The dead speak

There are some names in the obituary columns that say more than the voices of the living.

Such is the name of Dith Pran, who died in New Brunswick, N.J., March 30 at age 65. He was the Cambodian photographer who somehow survived the collection of killing fields that his country became after the Americans abandoned it. And who somehow made his way to the United States to tell the world about it.

Millions of his countrymen lost their lives after the Khmer Rouge swept into Phnom Penh and began rounding up unreliable types — i.e., just about anyone who could read and write. Literacy is dangerous. It gives people ideas, and only the party’s ideas were allowed in the Khmer Rouge’s new Cambodia. Holding others could prove a capital offense.

The toll of the Khmer Rouge’s brief but fatal reign of terror in Cambodia (1975-78) is uncertain — a million, two? Maybe a quarter, maybe a third of the country’s pre-communist population. The numbers can only be estimated, but the pictures of pyramids of skulls are well-known. They have become emblematic of that bloody time.

Cambodia got a new name (Democratic Kampuchea) and a new calendar, beginning with the Year Zero. Not just hundreds of thousands of people were to be wiped out but the past itself. The Marxist dream of creating the New Man never got so close to awful reality.

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way, not according to the sophisticates who advocated an American withdrawal from Indochina in the 1970s. They blithely dismissed all the warnings that a bloodbath would follow once the United States abandoned its allies in Southeast Asia:

“Some will find the whole bloodbath debate unreal. What future possibility could be more terrible than the reality of what is happening in Cambodia now?” — Anthony Lewis in the New York Times, March 17, 1975.

“The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is not guns but peace. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now.” — U.S. Rep. (now Sen.) Chris Dodd of Connecticut, March 12, 1975.

“The evidence is that in Cambodia the much-heralded bloodbath that was supposed to follow the fall of Phnom Penh has not taken place.” — the Nation, June 14, 1975, even as the bloodbath was taking place.

“Indochina without Americans/for most, a better life,” — headline in the New York Times, April 13, 1975.

The Times’ correspondent in Phnom Penh, Sydney H. Schanberg, may have been the most blithe of all about Cambodia’s better future once the Americans left. In a report four days before Phnom Penh fell, he wrote that for “ordinary people of Indochina… it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.”

Mr. Schanberg’s limited imagination would soon enough be demonstrated by the unspeakable realities to follow. If he was not the most optimistic of the learned naifs writing about a post-American Cambodia, surely he was the most influential, writing as he did for the widely read New York Times.

He was still sending optimistic dispatches even as the holocaust was proceeding. He was so monstrously wrong about what would happen in Cambodia after the communist victory there that he won a Pulitzer Prize for it. The name of his Cambodian photographer, translator, guide and friend? Dith Pran.

The fast-talking Cambodian managed to save Mr. Schanberg and other Western journalists from the Khmer Rouge, but was unable to make it out of the country with them. In the swirling chaos of the communist takeover, all was terror and confusion. The Khmer Rouge were emptying schools and hospitals and whole cities in their hunt for class enemies. (Anyone who wore glasses — the surest sign of a bourgeois intellectual — was in danger.)

At first Dith Pran pretended he had no education and passed himself off as a taxi driver. Then he threw away his money and posed as a peasant. Nothing was heard of him for more than four years, though there was a rumor he had been fed to the alligators, like his brother. He would lose some 50 members of his family altogether.

Story Continues →