Dith Pran, a photojournalist whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died Sunday at a hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 65.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his friend Sydney Schanberg.
Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as 2 million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate.
Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation. His credo: Make no move unless there was a 50-50 chance of not being killed.
He had been a journalistic partner of Schanberg, a New York Times correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia. With the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Schanberg was forced from the country, and Mr. Dith became a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian communists.
‘Death and Life’
Schanberg wrote about Mr. Dith in The New York Times Magazine in a 1980 cover article titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” (A book by the same title appeared in 1985.) The story became the basis of the movie “The Killing Fields.”
The film, directed by Roland Joffe, showed Schanberg, played by Sam Waterston, arranging for Mr. Dith’s wife and children to be evacuated from Phnom Penh as danger mounted. Mr. Dith, portrayed by Dr. Haing Ngor (who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor), insisted on staying in Cambodia with Schanberg to keep reporting the news. He believed that his country could be saved only if other countries grasped the gathering tragedy and responded.
A dramatic moment, both in reality and cinematically, came when Mr. Dith saved Schanberg and other Western journalists from certain execution by talking fast and persuasively to the trigger-happy soldiers who had captured them.
But despite his frantic effort, Schanberg could not keep Mr. Dith from being sent to the countryside to join millions working as virtual slaves.
Schanberg was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Cambodia. He accepted it on behalf of Mr. Dith as well.
For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, except for a false rumor that he had been fed to alligators, as had his brother. After more than four years of beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of a tablespoon of rice a day, Mr. Dith escaped over the Thai border on Oct. 3, 1979.
Mr. Dith moved to New York and in 1980 became a photographer for the Times, where he was noted for his imaginative pictures of city scenes and news events.
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“I’m a very lucky man to have had Pran as my reporting partner and even luckier that we came to call each other brother,” Schanberg said. “His mission with me in Cambodia was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through in a war that was never necessary. It became my mission too. My reporting could not have been done without him.”
Outside the Times, Mr. Dith spoke out about the Cambodian genocide, appearing before student groups and other organizations. “I’m a one-person crusade,” he said.
Survival story
To avoid summary execution, Mr. Dith hid that he was educated or that he knew Americans. He passed himself off as a taxi driver. He even threw away his money and dressed as a peasant.
Over the next 4 1/2 years, he worked in the fields and at menial jobs. For sustenance, people ate insects and rats and even the exhumed corpses of the recently executed, he said.
In November 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Mr. Dith went home to Siem Reap, where he learned that 50 members of his family had been killed; wells were filled with skulls and bones.
The Vietnamese made him village chief. But he fled when he feared that they had learned of his American ties. His 60-mile trek to the Thai border was fraught with danger. Two companions were killed by a land mine.