New York Times photojournalist and Cambodian “Killing Fields” Survivor Dith Pran died today of pancreatic cancer, reports Douglas Martin of the New York Times.

Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, which had spread, said his friend Sydney H. Schanberg.

Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians – a third of the population – were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.

The Khmer Rouge were the Cambodian communists.

Technorati Tags: Cambodia, Dith Pran, Killing Fields, New York Times, photojournalist

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