Monday, April 14, 2008
In the trailer for Roland Joffe's 1984 Academy Award-winning "The Killing Fields," Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston), a New York Times reporter whose coverage of the Cambodian war would earn him a Pulitzer Prize, says: "It was there in the war-torn countryside amidst the fighting between government troops and the Khmer Rouge guerillas that I met my guide and interpreter Dith Pran — a man who was to change my life in a country that I grew to love and pity."
Dith Pran also changed my life when he visited my radio show March 13, 1995. He referred to himself only as a messenger but, oh, did he ever bring a powerful message.
Dith was, in his own words, "a one-person crusade who must speak for those who did not survive and for those who still suffer." Dith, who coined the term "killing fields" to describe the countless corpses he encountered on a daily basis, would continue to advocate for victims of the Cambodian holocaust until his own death from pancreatic cancer two weeks ago at a New Brunswick, N.J., hospital. He was only 65.
The Cambodians themselves certainly didn't expect the genocide instigated by a Paris-educated Communist named Saloth Sar, who went by the nom de guerre "Pol Pot." The subsequent bloodbath would claim the lives of nearly 2 million civilians (28 percent of the population) in a frenzy of anti-intellectual, anti-Western cleansing.
The Khmer Rouge attempted an overnight step-back-in-time as they carved Cambodia into farming cooperatives and demanded total devotion to the state. To dissent was to die.
Dith, a product of a middle-class family, grew up near the ruins of the ancient temple called Angkor Wat, where he picked up English from tourists — a talent that would equip him to serve as a guide and interpreter to Schanberg in 1972.
Three years later, two weeks before the fall of Saigon, Schanberg and Dith (after Dith's family was safely evacuated) decided to stay and report as the Khmer Rouge stormed the capital of Phnom Penh.
Only a few days would pass before Schanberg and two other journalists would be arrested. Dith managed to convince the authorities that the reporters were French and they ended up at the French Embassy. Since Dith held a Cambodian passport, he ended up in a forced labor camp.
To survive, as Dith told me in 1995, he reinvented himself as an illiterate taxi-driver who remained under the Khmer Rouge radar by keeping his mouth shut and praying without ceasing. Dith labored 14 hours a day in the fields. To supplement the inadequate meals supplied by his captors, Dith opted to add insects and vegetation, no matter how unappetizing, to his diet. Many of his fellow prisoners and 50 of his relatives would not fare as well.
Dith may have been small in stature but a winsome smile that seemed to transform his entire face and a generous spirit made him appear larger than life. Years of torture had already taken a toll on his body — lining his face, slumping his shoulders and halting his speech. He mentioned, only in passing, the post-traumatic stress disorder that plagued him for two decades.
Yet, it was his eyes that seemed to mesmerize me — they were deep brown pools, dazzling with hope. In fact, his whole demeanor sparkled with the credibility that seems to cloak a speaker of pure, unadulterated truth.
In addition, I was most impressed by his total lack of resentment or rancor at being abandoned by his closest friend. When Schanberg and Dith were finally reunited in a refugee camp nearly five years later, Schanberg asked with some hesitation, "You forgive me?" Dith, his face wreathed in his usual ear-to-ear grin, quickly responded, "Nothing to forgive, Sydney. Nothing."
Back in 1995, as a member of the Cambodia Documentation Commission, Dith continued to seek out and preserve evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities in preparation for the time when the perpetrators could be brought to justice before an international tribunal.
Not only did Dith serve as an eloquent spokesman for the victims of the Cambodian slaughter, but he also sought out funding to dismantle the approximately 10 million land mines that lay buried in the soil of his homeland.
"Like one of my heroes, Elie Wiesel, who alerts the world to the horrors of the Jewish holocaust," Dith told me 13 years ago, "I try to awaken the world to the holocaust of Cambodia, for all tragedies have universal implications."
No quotation seems more appropriate to end this piece than Wiesel's own words on the subject: "The killer killed his victims once, and there is nothing on Earth we can do about it. But if they are forgotten, they will be killed a second time, and this we can and must prevent."
Aren't those words that could change your life?
— Beverly Kelley, Ph.D., who writes every other Monday for The Star, is an author ("Reelpolitik" and "Reelpolitik II") and professor in the Communication Department at California Lutheran University. Visit http://beverlykelley.typepad.com/my_weblog/. Her e-mail address is Kelley@clunet.edu.
In the trailer for Roland Joffe's 1984 Academy Award-winning "The Killing Fields," Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston), a New York Times reporter whose coverage of the Cambodian war would earn him a Pulitzer Prize, says: "It was there in the war-torn countryside amidst the fighting between government troops and the Khmer Rouge guerillas that I met my guide and interpreter Dith Pran — a man who was to change my life in a country that I grew to love and pity."
Dith Pran also changed my life when he visited my radio show March 13, 1995. He referred to himself only as a messenger but, oh, did he ever bring a powerful message.
Dith was, in his own words, "a one-person crusade who must speak for those who did not survive and for those who still suffer." Dith, who coined the term "killing fields" to describe the countless corpses he encountered on a daily basis, would continue to advocate for victims of the Cambodian holocaust until his own death from pancreatic cancer two weeks ago at a New Brunswick, N.J., hospital. He was only 65.
The Cambodians themselves certainly didn't expect the genocide instigated by a Paris-educated Communist named Saloth Sar, who went by the nom de guerre "Pol Pot." The subsequent bloodbath would claim the lives of nearly 2 million civilians (28 percent of the population) in a frenzy of anti-intellectual, anti-Western cleansing.
The Khmer Rouge attempted an overnight step-back-in-time as they carved Cambodia into farming cooperatives and demanded total devotion to the state. To dissent was to die.
Dith, a product of a middle-class family, grew up near the ruins of the ancient temple called Angkor Wat, where he picked up English from tourists — a talent that would equip him to serve as a guide and interpreter to Schanberg in 1972.
Three years later, two weeks before the fall of Saigon, Schanberg and Dith (after Dith's family was safely evacuated) decided to stay and report as the Khmer Rouge stormed the capital of Phnom Penh.
Only a few days would pass before Schanberg and two other journalists would be arrested. Dith managed to convince the authorities that the reporters were French and they ended up at the French Embassy. Since Dith held a Cambodian passport, he ended up in a forced labor camp.
To survive, as Dith told me in 1995, he reinvented himself as an illiterate taxi-driver who remained under the Khmer Rouge radar by keeping his mouth shut and praying without ceasing. Dith labored 14 hours a day in the fields. To supplement the inadequate meals supplied by his captors, Dith opted to add insects and vegetation, no matter how unappetizing, to his diet. Many of his fellow prisoners and 50 of his relatives would not fare as well.
Dith may have been small in stature but a winsome smile that seemed to transform his entire face and a generous spirit made him appear larger than life. Years of torture had already taken a toll on his body — lining his face, slumping his shoulders and halting his speech. He mentioned, only in passing, the post-traumatic stress disorder that plagued him for two decades.
Yet, it was his eyes that seemed to mesmerize me — they were deep brown pools, dazzling with hope. In fact, his whole demeanor sparkled with the credibility that seems to cloak a speaker of pure, unadulterated truth.
In addition, I was most impressed by his total lack of resentment or rancor at being abandoned by his closest friend. When Schanberg and Dith were finally reunited in a refugee camp nearly five years later, Schanberg asked with some hesitation, "You forgive me?" Dith, his face wreathed in his usual ear-to-ear grin, quickly responded, "Nothing to forgive, Sydney. Nothing."
Back in 1995, as a member of the Cambodia Documentation Commission, Dith continued to seek out and preserve evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities in preparation for the time when the perpetrators could be brought to justice before an international tribunal.
Not only did Dith serve as an eloquent spokesman for the victims of the Cambodian slaughter, but he also sought out funding to dismantle the approximately 10 million land mines that lay buried in the soil of his homeland.
"Like one of my heroes, Elie Wiesel, who alerts the world to the horrors of the Jewish holocaust," Dith told me 13 years ago, "I try to awaken the world to the holocaust of Cambodia, for all tragedies have universal implications."
No quotation seems more appropriate to end this piece than Wiesel's own words on the subject: "The killer killed his victims once, and there is nothing on Earth we can do about it. But if they are forgotten, they will be killed a second time, and this we can and must prevent."
Aren't those words that could change your life?
— Beverly Kelley, Ph.D., who writes every other Monday for The Star, is an author ("Reelpolitik" and "Reelpolitik II") and professor in the Communication Department at California Lutheran University. Visit http://beverlykelley.typepad.com/my_weblog/. Her e-mail address is Kelley@clunet.edu.
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