PHNOM PENH - Dith Pran, the Cambodian journalist whose harrowing tale of survival was told in the movie "The Killing Fields," helped awaken the world to the Khmer Rouge's atrocities, people in his homeland said Monday.
Dith Pran, 65, died Sunday of pancreatic cancer at a New Jersey hospital, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times whose intertwined story was also told in the 1984 film.
Dith Pran was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, when the Khmer Rouge took power in April 1975. One of the movie's most tense scenes shows him risking his life to help save the Times reporter.
Schanberg was later evacuated from Cambodia with other Westerners, while Dith Pran stayed behind and struggled to survive under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.
The communist group's radical policies while in power in 1975-79 led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people from hunger, disease, overwork and execution.
The sites where their bodies were unceremoniously disposed of became known as "killing fields."
While Dith Pran was just one of the millions of people who suffered under the Khmer Rouge, he was "the pioneer" in exposing the group's atrocities, said Chea Vannath, the former director of the non-profit Centre for Social Development.
"What was special about him is that he brought the Khmer Rouge's "killing fields" to the world," she said.
Information Minister Khieu Kanharith agreed that Dith Pran "was the one who played a key role for the world to become conscious about the killing fields."
Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, an independent centre researching the Khmer Rouge's crimes, said it was "a very sad thing" that Dith Pran had died before Cambodia's UN-backed genocide tribunal begins trying detained former Khmer Rouge leaders for their alleged roles in the atrocities.
However, Dith Pran "continues to be with us now and in the future for the cause of genocide justice," he said.
Dith Pran managed to escape to Thailand in 1979 after Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge.
He was later reunited with his family in the United States, where they had settled as refugees, and he became a photographer for The Times.
