Speaking for the Innocents : As Cambodia Undergoes a Painful Rebirth, Dith Pran Remembers--and Cannot Forgive

Dith Pran knows what it’s like to come back from the dead.

Minutes after his emotional reunion with reporter Sydney Schanberg in 1979, Pran remembers, he began shaking uncontrollably. As he told of his escape from the murderous Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian survivor sobbed and laughed, stunned by his newfound freedom and the ordeal he had survived.

“I am reborn,” Pran whispered to Schanberg, standing in a dusty refugee camp on the Thai border. “This is my second life.”

Now, 12 years later, the man whose story was told in the film “The Killing Fields” believes his tormented country also may be on the verge of a new life. After Cambodia’s two decades of civil war and starvation, a treaty signed Wednesday in Paris may finally bring peace and freedom to the nation.

If all goes according to plan, the soldiers from four warring factions will be disarmed and the Southeast Asian country will hold elections in 18 months. Hundreds of United Nations observers will be on hand to monitor the largest such peacekeeping operation in history.

It could be a time of national rebirth and could mean a return home for 350,000 Cambodian refugees around the world, including a large group in California. Another 350,000 are in camps in Thailand, waiting for the war to end. After years of frustration and delay, the Paris treaty may be their last, best chance.

But like so many other Khmer, as Cambodians are traditionally known in their country, Dith Pran is a bitter realist. He cannot ignore the horrors of the past--or the seeds of new anxiety about his country’s future.

As he sits in a cafeteria at the offices of the New York Times, where he has worked as a photographer since coming to America in 1979, the world’s most prominent advocate for Cambodian human rights shakes his head sadly. The next few months, he says, could mark a new beginning--or the return of an old nightmare.

“This is a peace we must accept, because it is what the world wants, and there is no alternative,” he says quietly. “But it is peace with pain. The killer has come back to the bargaining table, and this is a tragedy.”

A short, wiry man with thinning black hair, Pran explains that the new peace agreement--hammered out under U.N. supervision--permits the leaders of the Khmer Rouge to participate in the public life of the nation. The Marxist faction will hold one of four seats on a Supreme National Council and could gain control of the country if it wins enough votes in the elections.

It’s a prospect that fills many Cambodians with dread.

After toppling Lon Nol’s Western-backed military regime in 1975, the Khmer Rouge unleashed a reign of terror in Cambodia. They killed or starved more than 1 million of their countrymen, singling out doctors, lawyers, educators, journalists and other intellectuals. Led by Pol Pot, the trigger-happy guerrillas turned children against parents, banned modern medicine, forbade unmarried couples to make love and declared war on the outside world.

The guerrilla leaders were ousted in 1979, after the Vietnamese invaded and set up a puppet regime. Since then, the country has been consumed by civil war between the Phnom Penh government and three guerrilla factions, including the Khmer Rouge.

Despite worldwide condemnation of his atrocities, Pol Pot has been a key player in the peace talks and planning for postwar Cambodia. Supporters say he has no intention of fading away.

“For those of us who lived through these terrors, it is awful to see the Khmer Rouge back at the table,” Pran says. “People would never have let the Nazis return to power after the war. But here, with us, it is happening. It’s crazy. And it’s all because of international politics.”

Like millions of other Cambodians, Dith Pran has his own horror stories. When the Khmer Rouge took power, he was forced to leave his home in Phnom Penh and work 12 to 14 hours a day in rice paddies. A former assistant to New York Times reporter Schanberg, he was beaten, tortured and starved, until he finally fled through the jungle to the safety of a refugee camp in Thailand.

Pran’s wife and their four children escaped Cambodia in 1975 and came to America. But other family members were not so fortunate. His father, three brothers, a sister and other relatives were all killed by the Khmer Rouge.

“I am wounded, like all the others,” says Pran, reflecting on the genocide. “But our problems did not end with the Khmer Rouge. We must look to what will be happening in the future. We must pay attention .”

Pran speaks in a monotone, and his English is often halting. But somehow, he manages to lock a visitor’s eyes in his own and the message gets through. It’s a talent that has served him well, ever since “The Killing Fields” made him a celebrity in 1985. For six years, Pran has been lecturing across the country, urging listeners to remember Cambodia’s plight.

He has spoken before university audiences, bar associations, Cambodian activists, refugee organizations and other groups. He is represented by a professional speakers agency and has been honored at the White House by President Ronald Reagan. When he travels back to Cambodia, his visits and comments on the political situation are widely covered by the international media.

“I’m not a politician,” Pran says. “I’m just a messenger. I’m an innocent person who wants to tell his story to the world.”

It’s been an astonishing evolution for a man who was debilitated from malnutrition when he came to America, 12 years ago this month. These days, Pran is an accomplished Page 1 photographer who frequently has to tell subjects to calm down when they recognize him and ask for autographs.

Born near the famed temples of Angkor Wat, Pran, 49, never thought he would leave Cambodia. But he boasts now that his children have grown “big and tall” on an American diet. A U.S. citizen, he is proud of the small Brooklyn house where he and his wife live, telling friends: “I am New York.”

In his new life, Pran has had the same puzzling experiences as other Cambodian refugees. Modern technology fills him with awe, and he remains amazed that bank customers can get money from an automatic teller machine. It took him a while to get used to American tunnels, bridges and superhighways.

But he also misses traditional Cambodian culture. In Pran’s native land, the elderly and teachers are held in high regard. America, he says, “does not have this great respect . . . and it should.”

Asked what he does for fun and relaxation, the activist answers bluntly that his advocacy work takes up all his time. Indeed, Pran seems surprised by the question.

“I used to take my children camping, but no more,” he says. “They are all taller than me now. I worry about my country. This is my whole life.”

As the peace process lurches forward, Pran reflects bitterly that his homeland is still a pawn of the superpowers. He notes that Cambodia was dragged into the Vietnam War by Viet Cong and U.S. troops, both of whom invaded the country. The ensuing blood bath, marked by heavy American bombing, destroyed what had been a neutral, peace-loving nation.

It’s been downhill from there, Pran says, recalling the U.S.-backed coup that toppled Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970 and installed the Lon Nol regime. In the recent civil war, the Vietnamese invaders were backed by the Soviets. The Chinese supported the Khmer Rouge, and the United States aided a non-communist rebel faction. Sihanouk, hoping to represent independent Cambodian interests, led a third rebel army in the fray.

It took years for the superpowers to agree on a plan that would end the fighting. Indeed, Pran speculates that the war might still continue if the Soviet Union had not collapsed and terminated much of its military aid to Vietnam. At no point, he says, has Cambodia controlled its own destiny.

“We have always been caught in the middle, and the peace process we have now shows that,” he says quietly. “Nobody can say the Khmer Rouge have to go, because that would be bad for the Chinese. They would object to this. There would be no peace. They had to be listened to. So it’s very painful.”

Pran concedes that many of the Khmer Rouge’s younger members had no part in the killing fields, and does not wish to exclude them from postwar Cambodia. But to him the idea of Pol Pot and his henchmen playing a role is intolerable.

“I always tell Cambodian groups, ‘Be Jewish,’ ” he says. “You can’t let the killers return. You throw them out, just like they threw out the Nazis.

“We must agree on this one thing, that these people have no part in our country. Maybe we cannot bring them to trial; maybe they cannot be killed. But they must be out ,” Pran says angrily, slapping the table for emphasis.

It’s getting late in the evening, and the cafeteria is beginning to empty. Pran looks tired, but he seems filled with new energy when a visitor asks about the fate of Cambodian exiles scattered worldwide.

Will those Khmer in the West return to a land devastated by war and famine? Pran says he believes large numbers may go back to help rebuild their country. The nation will need massive aid, ranging from road-building programs and public health projects to schools and medical clinics.

But other Cambodians have been away too long, he adds. Some have become acclimated to their new lives, while others are skeptical about political changes in the land they left behind. It may be impossible for them to return.

There is an old saying among Khmer that, above all things, one must die in Cambodia. One must return. Pran acknowledges that tradition but says he will not go back to his homeland except for periodic visits.

Several years ago, Pran sent urgent telegrams to the Phnom Penh government, asking that his ailing 71-year-old mother be allowed to come to America. Red tape got in the way, and she died in Cambodia. Except for a sister, Pran has no immediate family left in the old country.

“Why would I go back?” he says. “I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing. Trying to tell the world what’s going on.”

It’s a decision that once might have seemed unthinkable, but Pran confesses that his dreams for Cambodia are clouded by nightmares that cannot be forgotten. On some nights he wakes up in a cold sweat, remembering what the Khmer Rouge did to him. He remembers . . . and cannot forgive.

“There is no doctor who can heal me,” Pran says. “But I know that a man like Pol Pot, he is even sicker than I am. He is crazy in the head, because he believed in killing people. He believed in starving children.

“We both have the horror in our heads. In Cambodia, the killer and the victim have the same disease.”