THOUSAND OAKS : Refugee Decries ‘Killing Fields’ of Cambodia

Cambodia is still coping with the horrors of the genocide witnessed in the 1970s, photojournalist Dith Pran said Wednesday in a speech at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.

Pran, whose escape from Cambodia was dramatized in the movie “The Killing Fields,” said the country is littered with about 10 million land mines, and that armed Khmer Rouge soldiers still control 20% of the nation.

Even so, he said the situation has improved from what he saw working for the New York Times 20 years ago.

Then, he said, Cambodians facing starvation were forced to scrounge for a “snail or crab or snake or grasshopper or insect . . . whatever you get.”

Those who avoided starvation were sometimes shot.

“They killed the children, they killed women, they killed the religious groups, and they killed regular people,” Pran said.

The atrocities shocked some members of the audience, about 60 students and professors who crowded into a large classroom for the afternoon lecture.

“It’s really upsetting to know that it happens around a region that I come from,” said Kim Wee, a sophomore biology major whose home is in Singapore.

Wee lingered after the speech to talk to Pran and take his photograph. “Singapore sold a lot of land mines to Cambodia,” Wee said.

Pran, who lives in New Jersey and works as a photographer on the metropolitan staff of the New York Times, travels during his days off to lecture on Cambodian history.

He said that even in areas such as Southern California, with large Cambodian populations, his lectures are important.

“They don’t want to talk. It hurts,” he said. “But because of my name, I have to do it.”

Even as he answered questions and pointed at dates written on a chalkboard, Pran acknowledged that he did not have all the answers about the deaths of an estimated 2 million Cambodians.

“The killing is hard to understand, even for myself as a witness, why they kill their own people,” he said.