‘Killing Fields’ survivor Pran dies

DITH PRAN, whose survival of the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge was dramatised in the film The Killing Fields, died yesterday, aged 65.

He died of pancreatic cancer at a hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey..

Pran, who used his fame to draw attention to his country’s plight, spent his last weeks in the hospital surrounded by family and friends. Among them was Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sydney Schanberg, who worked with him for the New York Times during the Cambodian civil war and recalled him as a dogged journalist who was “always doing good deeds for people in the Buddhist tradition”.

Best known for his depiction in the 1984 film The Killing Fields, Pran worked in Cambodia as a translator and journalist assisting Schanberg, who credits Pran with saving his life when they were arrested by the Khmer Rouge.

Forced into a labour camp when radical Communists seized control of his homeland in 1975, Pran endured four years of starvation and torture. He lost more than 50 relatives to the Khmer Rouge, including his father, three brothers and sister.

They were among 1.7 million people executed or left to die of torture, disease or starvation under Pol Pot’s 1975-1979 reign of terror as his dream of an agrarian peasant utopia turned into the Killing Fields nightmare. Fleeing to Thailand in 1979, Pran moved to the US, working as a photojournalist for The New York Times.