Dith Pran Dies

My internet at home is "junk", and I saw this right before I got off work yesterday, so I didn't have an opportunity to post this sad story, until today:

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 Sunday. He was 65.

Dith died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times. Dith 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.

LINK TO FULL STORY AND PHOTO

Prayers and Condolences to Dith Pran's family and friends!!

Khmer Rouge torture chief weeps at "Killing Fields"

I just finished a very powerful story about the Cambodian Infamous "Killing Fields" and the preparation for the trial of one of it's torturer's, and what happened as he was taken to one of the "fields".

The chief torturer under the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" regime wept and prayed on Tuesday as he led the judges who will try him for crimes against humanity around the mass graves for some of its victims.

Duch, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, accompanied 80 judges, lawyers and other officials of a U.N.-backed tribunal to the 129 graves, uncovered after a Vietnamese invasion sent the Khmer Rouge back to the jungles in 1979. "I saw Duch kneel in front of the trees where Khmer Rouge soldiers smashed children to death," a policeman told reporters after the four-hour tour. "He cried and apologized to the victims" in the former rice fields outside Phnom Penh, he said.

Some of the victims were from the regime's S-21 prison at the former Tuol Sleng high school in Phnom Penh run by Duch, now 66. About 14,000 people, including a few foreigners accused of being CIA spies, went into the jail to be tortured into confessing to working against a regime deemed responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million people. Only a handful emerged alive.

Stacks of excavated skulls mark the area, is how this area is described in the story. This should be an "interesting" trial to "watch", and we will update if further stories are published about it!!


killing fields