Dith, 65, died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times.
NEW YORK: Dith Pran, the Cambodian born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award winning film The Killing Fields, died on Sunday, colleague Sydney Schanberg said.
Dith, 65, died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times.
He had been diagnosed almost three months ago. Dith was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, when the Vietnam War reached its chaotic end in April 1975 and both countries were taken over by Communist forces.
Schanberg helped Dith's family get out but was forced to leave his friend behind after the capital fell; they were not reunited until Dith escaped four and a half years later.
Eventually, Dith resettled in the United States and went to work as a photographer for the Times. It was Dith himself who coined the term killing fields for the horrifying clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered on his desperate journey to freedom.
The regime of Pol Pot, bent on turning Cambodia back into a strictly agrarian society, and his Communist zealots were blamed for the deaths of nearly 2 million of Cambodia's 7 million people.
With thousands being executed simply for manifesting signs of intellect or Western influence Dith survived by masquerading as an uneducated peasant, toiling in the fields and subsisting on as little as a mouthful of rice a day, and whatever small animals he could catch.
After Dith moved to the US, he became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, dedicated to educating people on the history of the Khmer Rouge regime.
Schanberg described Dith's ordeal and salvation in a 1980 article titled The Death and Life of Dith Pran. Schanberg's reporting from Phnom Penh had earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1976.
Dith Pran was born Sept. 27, 1942, at Siem Reap, site of the famed 12th century ruins of Angkor Wat. Dith is survived by his companion, Bette Parslow; his daughter, Hemkarey; his sons, Titony, Titonath and Titonel; a sister, Samproeuth; six grandchildren; and two stepgrandchildren.
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