NEWS

Cambodian Holocaust survivor Dith Pran to speak Tuesday

By L.J. TOLER
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- Dith Pran, the photojournalist and Cambodian Holocaust survivor made famous in the movie "The Killing Fields," will speak at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday (March 27) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The free, public lecture in 100 Hamilton Hall will precede a 6:30 p.m. free showing and discussion of the 1984 movie, which won an Oscar for the late Haing S. Ngor, the actor who portrayed Pran. Pran will be keynote speaker for Human Rights Week Monday through Thursday (March 26-29) at UNC, sponsored by the Campus Y. Events will range from a demonstration of Falun Gong, the spiritual practice under fire in China, to a mock minefield demonstration, with life-size victim symbols and mock mines.

The Y will serve dinner during the Tuesday film showing and lecture, said Y assistant director Chimi Boyd. To participate in the dinner, contact the Y at 962-2333 or campusy@unc.edu by noon Monday (March 26).

A New York Times photographer since 1980, Pran, 58, heads the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project Inc., which seeks to educate American students about the genocide that occurred in Pran's native Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. He also is Goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

After the Vietnam War spilled over into his country, Pran became an interpreter and assistant for news organizations. From 1973-75, he assisted and took photos for The New York Times' Sydney Schanberg, who covered Cambodia's expanding civil war.

Most Americans left the country before the communist Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh on April 12, 1975, but Schanberg stayed to cover the fall of the capital. He asked Pran if he wanted to leave, but Pran chose to stay and help cover the events. It was Pran who got Schanberg's dispatches, the only Western eyewitness accounts of the takeover, to the rest of the world, wiring Saigon, Thailand or any place that would answer.

When the Khmer Rouge arrested the pair and two other journalists, Pran persuaded them to let the three Westerners go. But the communists marches Pran and the rest of his countrymen to camps where torture, executions and starvation reigned until the Vietnamese took over the country in 1979.

Just before that, Pran escaped to Thailand and then the United States, having lost some 50 of his relatives to the killing fields. The Khmer Rouge killed his three brothers and a sister; his father starved slowly; his mother died later of malnutrition.

Schanberg had tried to find Pran through the Red Cross and embassies, and had accepted a 1976 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Cambodia for Pran as well as himself.

Dates, times and descriptions of Human Rights Week events follow. For more information, call the Campus Y at 962-2333.

• Monday (March 26), 7 p.m., 103 Bingham: Father Emmanuel, a clergyman from Sri Lanka, will speak about ethnic conflict there.
• Tuesday (March 27), noon to 1 p.m., The Pit (outside the Frank Porter Graham Student Union): Local Falon Gong practitioners will explain the religion -- which draws on Buddhism, Taoism and traditional Chinese beliefs -- and demonstrate its meditation exercises, which are similar to tai chi.
• Wednesday (March 28), noon, Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center (student union): Discussion, "Human Rights in Africa" led by Brenda Schoonover, U.S. Ambassador to Togo, a country in Africa.
• Wednesday (March 28), 6-8 p.m., The Pit and Polk Place (quad between South Building and Wilson LIbrary): Anti-Hate Crimes Rally sponsored by Student Government and other student organizations. Afterward participants may join students' annual Take Back the Night March, set to start at 8 p.m.
• Thursday (March 29), 11 a.m.-2 p.m., The Pit: Mock minefield with illustrations of people who have been killed by land mines, video about land mines around the world and fund-raising for the U.S. United Nations Association's Adopt-A-Minefield campaign. Sponsors are the UNC student group the United National Organization, which participates in model United Nations conferences and works with UNICEF.
• Thursday (March 29), 7 p.m., 104 Peabody: Criminal Justice Speak-out, on perceived inequities in the criminal justice system and opinions about capital punishment, sponsored by the Criminal Justice Action and Awareness committee of the Campus Y and Campaign to End the Death Penalty.

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