Photo. The best known monument of the Killing Fields is Choeung Ek. Today, it is the site of a Buddhist memorial to the terror. The monument is filled with sculls from humans who where killed by the Khmer Rouge. © Travel Explorations.
According to his former New York Times colleague, Sydney Schanberg, Dith Pran died at a hospital in New Jersey from pancreatic cancer at the age of 65 (on news 30 March 2008).
In 1984 the movie The Killing Fields was released. It tells the story of the journalist Dith Pran, played by Cambodian actor Haing S. Ngor, and his journey to escape the death camps.
Dith Pran and Sydney Schanberg were in Cambodia in 1975 to report the fall of Phnom Penh to Khmer forces.
Mr. Pran was not allowed to leave, and had to endure four years of torture and starvation before escaping to Thailand.
In 1980, Mr. Schanberg described his colleague's ordeal in a magazine article, and later a book, called "The Death and Life of Dith Pran". It became the basis for the Oscar-winning Hollywood film, the mentioned The Killing Fields.
| Photo. The earlier prison and torture chamber Tuol Sleng in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, is now a museum commemorating the genocide. © Travel Explorations. |
 |
The Khmer Rouge was the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, during which it was responsible for one of the worst mass killings of the 20th Century. The regime claimed the lives of more than a million people. Some estimates say up to 2.5 million perished.
Under the Marxist leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge tried to take Cambodia back to the Middle Ages, forcing millions of people from the cities to work on communal farms in the countryside. But this dramatic attempt at social engineering had a terrible cost, and whole families died from execution, starvation, disease and overwork.
It`s amazing how Dith Pran manage to escape from the Khmer Rouge and survive under such insane circumstances. He is gone now, but his story most not be forgotten. There are few things in life that gives a stronger impression than the museum Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh and the Choeung Ek monument of the Killing Fields. It reminds about how cruel humans can be sometimes.
Stein Morten Lund, 15 April 2008
Additional information
Read more about Cambodia on our global travelguide Travel Explorations: www.TravelExplorations.com.
E-mail this
Print this
