Editorial: He showed us the light by focusing on the dark

04/01/2008
San Antonio Express-News

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but when the words express disgust, revulsion and moral outrage, the picture should be worth more — a lot more.

What Dith Pran — and his photographs — gave the world was invaluable. They unveiled a harsh, ugly landscape that needed to be shown. The only thing worse than brutality is brutality committed in dark shadows, unseen by those who might raise their voices in protest.

If Pran protested, he did not have to. His photographs were eloquent enough, depicting the horrific regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It was in the mid-1970s, and he coined the term that would serve as the title for an Oscar-winning movie a decade later — "The Killing Fields."

Pran served as a translator for New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg. But, as Schanberg told PBS News, the translator would become as committed as the journalist himself. And, soon, translating was not enough for the young man; he had to document.

And document he did, his photographs a stark reminder that genocide did not end with Hitler or Stalin. He showed the world a land that was hard to imagine — and harder to stomach. And as he depicted this world — a world in which the regime killed 2 million people in four years — he braved many of the dangers faced by the soldiers on the battlefields.

"He had a smile that could light up a city block," Schanberg told National Public Radio. "He was a special person, and Buddhism was a big part of that... He believed in the tenet that you do good things and you will be rewarded... Pran did many, many of them for people who were at risk during the war."

Schanberg never considered his friend and colleague a mere "fixer," the term for local people who helped foreign correspondents.

"His legacy is really a magnificent one," Schanberg told the radio network. "At the very least, he was my equal... and often my better. That's what he was. He wasn't just an assistant..."
And he was motivated by the simplest — and noblest — cause.

"His mission," Schanberg said, "was to tell the world what was happening to his people."

Pran, a hero who wielded nothing more menacing than a camera, died of pancreatic cancer the other day; he was 65.

Jane Freiman Schanberg/Associated Press Dith Pran bravely put a spotlight on the horrific actions of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge.