Creator

Dith Pran

ឌិត ប្រន

Cambodian photojournalist and interpreter who collected and edited survivor testimony from the Khmer Rouge period.

Dith Pran (ឌិត ប្រន) was a Cambodian American photojournalist who survived the Khmer Rouge and coined the term killing fields.[1][2] As interpreter and guide to journalist Sydney Schanberg, he reported on the war in Cambodia, and he later joined the staff of The New York Times. His experiences were the basis of the film The Killing Fields.[1][3] He founded and led the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project and, with Kim DePaul, edited Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields, a book of survivor accounts. He died on March 30, 2008.[1][4]

Early life and work

Dith Pran was born in Siem Reap, near the Angkor temples. He learned French at school and taught himself English.[1][5] In the 1960s he worked as an interpreter for the United States Military Assistance Command in Cambodia, for five years until 1965.[6][5] After Cambodia cut its ties with the United States in 1965, he worked with a British film crew on Lord Jim and as a hotel receptionist.[1][7] After the 1970 coup that removed Norodom Sihanouk, he returned to Phnom Penh and interpreted for Times reporters.[8]

Reporting the war

Dith Pran met Sydney Schanberg, then the Singapore-based correspondent of The New York Times, in 1972, and began working as his interpreter as the Vietnam War spread into Cambodia.[9][10] By mid-1973 he worked only for Schanberg, as an official Times stringer. He translated, took notes and photographs, and helped Schanberg move through fast-changing conditions, and he learned photography along the way.[10][6][11] He had no formal training in journalism. When an American B-52 mistakenly bombed a Mekong River town, killing or wounding about 400 people, he bribed a patrol-boat crew to take them there and another to bring them back to Phnom Penh in time for Schanberg's deadline.[10] Schanberg later said his reporting in Cambodia could not have been done without him.[11]

When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in April 1975, Dith Pran stayed to witness the end of the war.[9] On April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge soldiers detained him, Schanberg and other journalists. Ordered to leave the group, he pleaded to stay with them and talked with the soldiers for more than two hours until they let everyone go.[10][6] Foreign reporters were then allowed to leave Cambodia; he was not.[1] In 1976 Schanberg accepted the Pulitzer Prize for his Cambodia reporting on behalf of himself and Dith Pran.[3]

Under the Khmer Rouge

After leaving the French Embassy, Dith Pran was forced into the rural labor camps.[10] He hid his education and his ties to Americans, dressed as a peasant and claimed to have been a taxi driver.[1][10] He later said that to survive he had to pretend to be stupid, because the Khmer Rouge did not want smart people.[9] He worked in the rice fields for 14 to 18 hours a day and lived on bark, mice and insects. Over four and a half years he was beaten, tortured and nearly starved to death.[10][6][7]

After Vietnam drove the Khmer Rouge from power in January 1979, he went back to his village near Siem Reap. In the forest nearby he found the remains of as many as 5,000 Cambodians.[1][10] From the clusters of corpses and skeletons he passed on his escape, he coined the term "killing fields."[1][8] The Vietnamese authorities made him village chief, but he resigned after they learned he had worked for an American journalist. Fearing reprisals, he escaped across the Thai border on October 3, 1979, walking about 40 miles (60 km) in some accounts and 100 miles (160 km) in the Los Angeles Times.[1][10][7] From the refugee camp he sent word to Schanberg, who flew to Thailand and found him there.[8][10]

Life in the United States

Schanberg brought Dith Pran to the United States. In 1980 The New York Times hired him as a trainee in its photography department, and he worked as a Times photographer until 2007, becoming known for his human-interest pictures.[8][9][10] He became a U.S. citizen in 1986.[7] Schanberg's 1980 article "The Death and Life of Dith Pran" told his story and made him known in the United States; Schanberg expanded it into a book in 1985.[6]

The Killing Fields (1984), directed by Roland Joffé, told the story of his survival and his reunion with Schanberg. Haing S. Ngor, who had also escaped Cambodia, played him and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, one of the film's three Oscars.[6][7][10] The film brought him worldwide recognition.[1]

Advocacy

Dith Pran spent the rest of his life working for recognition of the victims of the Cambodian genocide. "I am a Cambodian holocaust survivor," he often said, "and I have to be a messenger."[10] In 1994 he founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, which he led as president until his death. The project teaches students about the history of the Khmer Rouge and keeps photographic records to help Cambodians search for missing relatives.[1][10] He addressed United Nations councils, testified before the congressional subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs and spoke at schools and universities.[6] He was named a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and was honored at the White House.[5][11] Through the 1990s and after, he lectured on the killing fields while genocide unfolded in Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.[9]

With the Cambodia Documentation Commission, a human rights group, he worked to preserve evidence of the killings and to bring those responsible before an international tribunal, and he returned to Cambodia with the commission in 1989.[10] He shared with Haing S. Ngor the aim of seeing Pol Pot tried. After Pol Pot's death in 1998, he said Cambodia's search for justice should go on, as the Jewish people's had after Hitler's death.[10][8] Ben Kiernan, founding director of the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University, credited him with a key role in bringing the crimes of the Khmer Rouge to the attention of the United States.[10]

He died of pancreatic cancer on March 30, 2008, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, at 65.[1][3] In March 2008 he urged others to be tested for cancer.[8] New York Times executive editor Bill Keller called him a journalist and a hero.[11]

Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields

Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors, compiled by Dith Pran and edited with Kim DePaul, gathers 30 short first-person accounts by Cambodians who were children under the Khmer Rouge and adults when their stories were recorded.[4][6] Yale University Press published the 192-page volume in 1997; the Los Angeles Times dates the book to 1998.[4][10]

Recognition

He received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 1998, the Award of Excellence of the International Center and several honorary degrees.[1][6]

Works


See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 Wikipedia: Dith Pran
  2. ↑ NPR, Dith Pran, 'Killing Fields' Journalist, Dies at 65 (March 31, 2008)
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 NPR transcript
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Kirkus Reviews, Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Los Angeles Times, From the Archives: Dith Pran, 'Killing Fields' was his story (March 31, 2008)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 EBSCO, Dith Pran - Biography - Research Starters - EBSCOhost (2024-10-01)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 HISTORY, How Dith Pran's Remarkable Survival Story Exposed Cambodia's Killing Fields (May 3, 2024)
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 CBC News, Cambodian Killing Fields survivor Dith Pran dies of cancer (March 30, 2008)
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 PBS News, Famed Cambodian-born Journalist Dith Pran Dies (2008-03-31)
  10. ↑ 10.00 10.01 10.02 10.03 10.04 10.05 10.06 10.07 10.08 10.09 10.10 10.11 10.12 10.13 10.14 10.15 10.16 10.17 Los Angeles Times, Dith Pran, 65; helped reveal 'Killing Fields' (March 31, 2008)
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 The Seattle Times, Cambodian Killing Fields survivor Dith Pran, 65
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This page was last edited on 26 September 2026, at 23:35.