AAJA
March 10, 2008
Long-time New York Times photographer and AAJA member Dith Pran was released from the hospital March 7 and is staying at a care center in Edison, NJ. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January and was hospitalized for three weeks.
Dith is best known for escaping the Cambodian Holocaust. An estimated 2 million people were killed in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 under the Khmer Rouge communist regime. The killing and burial sites were referred to as the "The Killing Fields." In 1984, a motion picture of the same title chronicled Dith Pran's journey to escape these death camps. Cambodian Actor Haing S. Ngor won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Dith Pran.
In 2000, AAJA named the championship trophy for its annual photo competition after Dith. So far the names of seven Asian American up-and-coming photojournalists are now engraved on the trophy.
In 2004, AAJA honored Dith with the "Pioneers in Journalism" award as part of the launching of the organization's 25th Anniversary Endowment campaign. Dith was honored alongside Peter Bhatia of The Oregonian, veteran broadcast journalist Connie Chung, pioneering Asian American male broadcaster Ken Kashiwahara and Hearst Newspapers columnist Helen Thomas.
March 10, 2008
Long-time New York Times photographer and AAJA member Dith Pran was released from the hospital March 7 and is staying at a care center in Edison, NJ. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January and was hospitalized for three weeks.
Dith is best known for escaping the Cambodian Holocaust. An estimated 2 million people were killed in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 under the Khmer Rouge communist regime. The killing and burial sites were referred to as the "The Killing Fields." In 1984, a motion picture of the same title chronicled Dith Pran's journey to escape these death camps. Cambodian Actor Haing S. Ngor won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Dith Pran.
In 2000, AAJA named the championship trophy for its annual photo competition after Dith. So far the names of seven Asian American up-and-coming photojournalists are now engraved on the trophy.
In 2004, AAJA honored Dith with the "Pioneers in Journalism" award as part of the launching of the organization's 25th Anniversary Endowment campaign. Dith was honored alongside Peter Bhatia of The Oregonian, veteran broadcast journalist Connie Chung, pioneering Asian American male broadcaster Ken Kashiwahara and Hearst Newspapers columnist Helen Thomas.
Related Story
Legendary Photojournalist Dith Pran Battling Cancer
Dith Pran, who survived torture under the genocidal Khmer Rouge after helping The New York Times’s Cambodia correspondent for three years, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January. He was hospitalized for three weeks starting in mid-February, and was released to the Roosevelt Care Center in Edison, NJ, on Friday.
After escaping his country in 1979, Dith, 65, became a photographer for The New York Times in 1980, where he remains on staff. [His given name is Pran; Dith is his family name.] He was made famous by the 1984 film “The Killing Fields,” which depicts him in his role as a translator and journalist assisting Sydney Schanberg, then a foreign correspondent for The Times.
Schanberg covered the Cambodian civil war from 1972 until the Communists took over in 1975, creating a slave society, banishing city dwellers to work camps in the countryside and executing anyone perceived as educated. Most Western reporters left the country when the severity of the Khmer Rouge’s rule became apparent, but Schanberg and a handful of others stayed, with Dith continuing to assist.
Visiting a hospital with Schanberg and two other journalists, Dith and the others were arrested and held for execution. Dith saved their lives by convincing the Khmer Rouge that the reporters were neutral French nationals (they were not). Schanberg and the other foreigners soon left the country.
Dith was exiled to a labor camp, where one of the deprivations was being fed only one spoonful of rice a day. In October 1979 he walked to Thailand, where he gained his freedom. In January 1980, Schanberg wrote “The Death and Life of Dith Pran” in The New York Times Magazine. The memoir became the basis for the movie, and Dith’s renown was established.
During the Khmer Rouge regime, about 1.5 million Cambodians were killed or starved to death by the government. Dith, who was born September 27, 1942, lost 50 family members to the Khmer Rouge, including his parents, three brothers, a sister and their families. Only one sister survived.
Dith founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project to educate American students about the mass killings. He has testified before U.S. House and Senate subcommittees on East Asia and the Pacific, and was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 1985.
In 1997 he compiled “Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors” (Yale). The child witnesses, now grown up, write of babies killed by bayonets and adults killed with the backs of hoes — to save on bullets. In a review of the book in The New York Times, Lance Gould writes, “The overwhelming simplicity of the contributors’ recollections builds a solid, irrefutable censure of one of humanity’s most shocking crimes.”
Despite his accolades, including four honorary doctorates, Dith remains humble and dedicated to his homeland. “Part of my life is saving life. I don't consider myself a politician or a hero. I’m a messenger. If Cambodia is to survive, she needs many voices.”
