Spreading the Word of the Cambodian Genocide
The Daily Iowan
THE DAILY IOWAN
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WEDNESDAY
October 28, 1998
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Bringing the killing fields close to home
* The Cambodian photojournalist portrayed in the movie "The Killing Fields"
spoke at the UI Tuesday evening.
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By Anna Vorm
The Daily Iowan
With arms gesturing widely, Dith Pran told a crowd of approximately 400
Tuesday night that he understood the risk of being caught by the Khmer Rouge
but overlooked the danger in order to photograph the suffering during the
Cambodian civil war.
"I could have left with my family," said Pran, a native of Cambodia and now
a photojournalist for The New York Times. "I didn't miss the plane," he
joked.
While his wife and children were sent abroad to the United States, Pran
risked his life by continuing to work as a war correspondent. After Pol
Pot's Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, Pran was sent to "the killing
fields," a forced labor camp.
Pran, the Ida Beam Visiting Scholar in the College of Education, spoke of
his experiences in a lecture titled "The Killing Fields of Southeast Asia"
in the Buchanan Auditorium at Pappajohn Business Administration Building.
After giving a 30-minute history lesson on the Vietnam conflict, complete
with an overhead projection of Southeast Asia, Pran began telling his
personal story.
In 1979, Pran, now 56, escaped from the camp by crossing the border into
Thailand and began telling his story to whomever would listen. He recounted
the horror suffered by many in the country and the loss of those close to
him.
"I'll never stop talking because 2 million people are already gone --
including my three brothers. My sister. My father. My niece. My uncle. My
neighbor," Pran said.
His story was eventually made into the critically acclaimed movie "The
Killing Fields." Haing Ngor, a Cambodian with a past similar to Pran's,
played Pran in the movie.
Both spread the word across the United States of the Khmer Rouge's
atrocities until Ngor was murdered outside his California home in March
1996.
"Ngor took the West Coast, and I took the East," said Pran in a news
conference held Tuesday before the lecture.
Pran said he hopes to find others who will speak out.
"You cannot keep talking as you get older and older," Pran said. "So you
have to recruit."
He aspires to motivate some of the survivors in his new book, "Children of
Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors," to share their accounts.
He said he compiled the stories of 29 Cambodians who were children at the
time of the Cambodian holocaust.
Pran is scheduled to give a presentation today to nearly 100 middle and high
school students from Iowa at the College of Education's second annual
International Day, an event focused on worldwide human rights.
The event was in conjunction with the "Global Focus: Human Rights '98"
lecture series.
DI reporter Anna Vorm can be reached at:
avorm@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu
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Title: Bringing the killing fields close to home
Page: 1A
Date: 10/28/98
More news & archives at our websites;
The Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, Inc
P.O. Box 1616
Woodbridge, New Jersey 07095
Dith
Pran
Website:http://www.DithPran.org
Website:http://www.Cambodian.com
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