Dith Pran a New York Times photographer who died over the weekend at 65, used to say: "I'm not a hero - I'm a messenger." That's because he was one of the lucky ones: a tenacious survivor of the 1975-79 Cambodian holocaust, when the communist Khmer Rouge slaughtered 1 million people - nearly a third of the nation's population - while the world looked on.
He devoted the rest of his life to telling the story - best known through the 1984 film "The Killing Fields."
Dith, a translator-photographer for Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg, remained behind after the fall of Phnom Penh to help report the Khmer Rouge takeover. But when Western journalists were forced to leave, Dith became a prisoner, spending three years at forced labor. Dith endured four years of starvation and torture in the Khmer Rouge's forced labor camps before escaping to Thailand in 1979. A photojournalist for the New York Times since 1980, Dith ran the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project. He lost more than fifty relatives to the Khmer Rouge, including his father, three brothers, one sister, and their families.
