US:DITH PRAN, a journalist and human rights advocate who became a public face of the horrors in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and whose life was portrayed in the influential film The Killing Fields, has died at 65 of pancreatic cancer. He lived in New Jersey.
For much of the early 1970s, Dith was a resourceful guide and interpreter in Cambodia for Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times, whose reporting on the country's civil war and the rise of the Khmer Rouge won a Pulitzer Prize. Schanberg accepted the award on behalf of himself and Dith, whom he credited with saving his life.
Schanberg's partnership with Dith became the basis for The Killing Fields(1984), which conveyed in personal terms the brutality of the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot from 1975 to 1979. Nearly two million Cambodians died during those years.
In speeches and lectures, Dith gave vivid and compelling accounts of the genocide, including the death of more than 50 members of his family. He was told that one of his brothers, who served in the Cambodian army, was thrown to crocodiles.
The Khmer Rouge tried to remake the country by killing anyone who had political opinions or seemed educated. Dith spent four years disguising his middle-class background by dressing as a peasant and working in rice fields.
Of the killing fields, or mass graves in the countryside, he once told Schanberg: "You could always tell the killing grounds because the grass grew taller and greener where the bodies were buried." Pol Pot died in Thailand in 1998 without answering to an international tribunal. UN-backed trials began last year.
Dith founded an organisation to collect personal stories about Khmer Rouge crimes and compiled a book of survivors' memories.
Dith was born in 1942 in Siem Reap, in northern Cambodia. He learned French and English, and his language skills brought him work as a translator for the US military and visiting film crews.
In Phnom Penh Dith became a favourite of the visiting press corps. He gained a reputation for adeptness at obtaining hotel rooms and bribing teletype operators to get stories out.
He formed his closest working relationship with Schanberg. "He got hooked on this story in the same way I did," Schanberg said. "He wanted the story of what was happening to get out."
Dith's wife and children were able to leave Cambodia through Schanberg's connections at the US embassy. At great peril, the two men remained in the capital after the Khmer Rouge entered the city in April 1975. At one point, bullying Khmer Rouge soldiers forced them aboard a truck likely bound for their execution. Schanberg credited Dith with their survival: Dith persuaded the driver that the reporters were French and were there to cover the Khmer Rouge victory with sympathy.
In Phnom Penh, Schanberg was able to obtain safe passage to Thailand through the French embassy, but Dith was among the many Cambodians turned away after the Khmer Rouge threatened embassy officials about awarding passports to help locals escape.
He found work in rice fields near his home village. Like others, he was reduced to daily rations of a spoonful of rice plus whatever snails, rats, insects and tree bark he could find. Any excuse was used to beat or execute people.
After the Vietnamese invasion, Dith began searching for his family. Only his mother and one sister had survived. The rest had starved or been executed.
The New York Timesarranged for his safe passage to New York and trained him to work as a staff photographer, a position he held since 1980, while also assuming a greater role as an activist.