Remembering the Killing Fields
Schanberg hitches a ride on an Indian army truck, December 13, 1971
I speak to Sydney Schanberg on April 17, 2010, 35 years to the day since the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge. When the communist guerrillas took control of the Cambodian capital on that chaotic day in 1975, five years of civil war came to an end -and four years of genocide began.
The date could not be more fitting. Schanberg was there in 1975, one of only a handful of foreign journalists who had remained in Phnom Penh after the evacuation of the US embassy five days earlier. Determined to see the story to its conclusion, he ignored instructions from his bosses at the New York Times to flee the country. With the assistance of his Cambodian colleague and interpreter Dith Pran (see photo next page), he covered the final days of the short-lived Khmer Republic and the bloody beginnings of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea.
“There were only a few of us in Phnom Penh the last week and papers around the world were picking up our copy. And it was our copy. It wasn’t just my copy. He was in these stories all the way.” The events of April 17 cemented a lifelong bond between Dith and Schanberg and their extraordinary journalistic double-act earned the latter the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. He accepted it on behalf of Dith, then still a prisoner in the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge. The remarkable story of their friendship and Dith’s eventual escape is told in the Oscar-winning 1984 film The Killing Fields, which brought international attention to the plight of the Cambodian people.
Schanberg is 76 now and describes himself as “a gasbag old guy” who is “still pushing the envelope,” but his memories of 35 years ago flow effortlessly when I ask him what he remembers of that day. “Chaotic, misleading, everybody was out with flags and saying c’est la paix, you know, welcoming the newcomers but not knowing anything about them. And it seemed celebratory for a while – very, very odd. We met Khmer Rouge soldiers in the street and talked to them, very weird conversations.”
But if the atmosphere was at first celebratory, if uncertain, things quickly soured as the reality of the situation became clearer. “Later, when we saw the fighters – the guerrillas – they looked at you in a very cold way. They were in a way, I would say, dead behind the eyes. And you knew you were not talking to people who cared a bit about you. You might as well have been an ant. And the day went on like that until we realised they were doing something – that is, emptying the city.” The evacuation of Phnom Penh had begun. The city’s entire population, already swollen by an influx of refugees, was forced to march into the countryside by the victorious Khmer Rouge. Millions would die as the new regime attempted to transform Cambodia into a collectivised agrarian society; 1975 was fading into Year Zero.
Photo of Dith Pran taken by East German newsman Gerhard Leo, in Angkor Wat on February 15, 1979
As the city was emptied that day, Schanberg himself came within seconds of execution when he and several colleagues were captured by Khmer Rouge soldiers. “It looked like things were over for us. They drove us to the banks of the Mekong and opened the back door of this armoured personnel carrier. And there were men standing there on the sand with guns pointed at us and we thought they were – and they were – the firing squad.”
Schanberg and the others were only saved by some fast talking from Dith. “We didn’t know what he was arguing with them about when they first captured us. He finally climbed into this machine with us. What the argument was, they were telling him that they weren’t interested in him. They were interested only in the ‘big people’, and they tried to shoo him away. And he told me later: you would be lost without me – I knew I had to come with you; and so he came.” The bluff worked: at great risk to himself, Dith persuaded the guerrillas that the captives were not Americans and that as journalists they were protected. “That’s when the guns were dropped and that’s when we were released.” It is now 35 years since Dith’s selfless intervention; without it, Schanberg would not be here.
Ever the professional, though, he is careful that his own story does not obscure the bigger picture. “That’s what I remember about that day. You know, we use a word like surreal, but I’ll never forget it. I mean, it’s not us being captured, it’s about emptying a city of more than 2 million people.” After an unsuccessful attempt to forge a British passport for Dith, he too was forced to join the exodus into the countryside. Schanberg was deported with the other remaining foreigners and it was four years before the friends were reunited at the Surin refugee camp on the Thai border.
Cambodia is not the only conflict that Schanberg has covered. He reported on the Vietnam War, the 1971 India-Pakistan war in Bangladesh, and he was back in Phnom Penh in 1997 in time to witness Cambodia’s most recent military takeover. His new book, Beyond the Killing Fields, a collection of his war writings, covers all of these conflicts and more. But he insists that “Cambodia will always stand out. The Cambodians were the most helpless of the people who were attacked.” It is this compassion and humanity that underpins Schanberg’s journalism, and it is what cemented his friendship and working relationship with Dith. “My friendship with Pran grew and grew and grew in Cambodia. He wanted the same things I did, from a different perspective, a different angle. These were his people, and he wanted me to tell the world everything about them – everything that was happening to them.”
For Schanberg, what was happening to them was very clear. President Nixon had forged a cynical alliance with Cambodia to alleviate pressure on the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam; the Cambodian army was to be beefed up in the hope that American casualties could be reduced. “The point is, it was – for an American – a faux kind of alliance. We didn’t really care – our government, my government – didn’t really care about Cambodia. They hadn’t cared about Cambodia in the centuries before and they didn’t really care about Cambodians as individuals. They cared about themselves. And that was also true of the Chinese who backed the Khmer Rouge, and the Russians who backed the Khmer Rouge for a while. All of them had their own interests at heart and the Cambodians were insignificant to them.”
The 1970 invasion of Cambodia by US ground forces pushed Vietnamese and Cambodian communists deeper into the country. The war spread, and an illegal American programme of carpet bombing decimated the Cambodian countryside.
Refugees flee the shelling as the Khmer Rouge advance on the city
Schanberg remains adamant that it was this US activity that enabled the Khmer Rouge to take power and caused so many people to die. “This is the key thing that nobody wants to remember. The Khmer Rouge at that time in 1970 were an annoying factor of Cambodian life, but they were – I wouldn’t say meaningless – yet not able to overthrow the government and were not motivated enough. And this provided them with a great recruitment tool. They could point to all of this activity against them, and people who were dying, and they would point to the skies to the American planes that were bombing, and say: there’s your enemy.”
“At that time the estimates of their strength were 3-5000 unconnected gangs of guerrillas, no central control. By the end of the war they were 70-100,000, a very different beast. And they had become more brutal as time went on. So I think we gave them the enemy they needed to build themselves and I think that people like Henry Kissinger – who is a master of his own brand of history – he has to know somewhere inside him that he built, that he was an architect of their growth. And that is the truth.”
If this all sounds like history, it is not. That chaotic decade shaped the Cambodia of today and the issue of justice for the crimes of the 1970s remains open and contentious. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) were established by the Cambodian government and the UN in 2006, and the slow process of trying five Khmer Rouge leaders is currently underway. For Schanberg, the point of the ECCC is not justice. “The rules of this trial are very soft. There is no death penalty under the rules of this tribunal and none of them are going to their deaths as a result.” Its real value, he says, is in raising awareness of the genocide amongst Cambodians. As with his colleague Dith Pran, who spent his life educating the world about the Cambodian genocide, what matters most to Schanberg is that no one forgets. “I wouldn’t say stop the trial at all – yes, you need it, but it isn’t closure you get. It just tells people that everybody in the country now knows about this. They can’t pretend it was so long in the past that nothing went on like that.” As much a realist as an idealist, Schanberg concedes that “there’s no perfect justice here,” but he clearly yearns for a justice greater than the one history has delivered. “I believe that the American entrance into that country, and the entrance of the Soviet Union and the Chinese, was a war crime. And of course the way the world works, then if you carry that to its logical conclusion, you’d want the people on trial – the leaders of those three countries. And that isn’t going to happen, is it?”
U.S. Marines head for the last helicopter on the soccer field after evacuating the U.S. Embassy
The role of journalism, Schanberg clearly feels, is in shedding light on this gap between what does happen and what should happen. “I don’t believe we solve things, we’re not magicians. But we make a contribution when we are doing our work properly. And that is, it is a swamp out there. The world is full of negative things but it is also full of positive things. And the goal, I always felt, was – should be – for journalism to keep the swamp from getting any larger or the water from getting any higher.”
It is this same sentiment that prompted Schanberg to publish Beyond the Killing Fields in March. He is not the first journalist to see similarities between American foreign policy in the 1970s and American foreign policy in the Bush era, but he teaches the lessons of the past with greater authority than most. The book, he says, offers a model for both policy makers and reporters. “It tells you what I believe good journalism is and the things you have to tell people about war, and the lies you have to reveal. I don’t necessarily think that anything in that book is going to change the way the world works. But if it helps some people not to be so eager to rush to war, then I will feel that it has some benefit and that it was worthy of being published.” For everyone else, it is simply a fascinating read.
As we speak, Schanberg ranges from subject to subject, expressing strong but considered opinions on everything we discuss. But the topic of conversation that animates him most is, by far, his friendship with Dith Pran. For anyone who has seen The Killing Fields, the iconic final scene that depicts their reunion is hard to forget. “Do you remember that scene from the film?” he asks. “Well, that’s exactly what happened. He and I ran toward each other and he leaped up and wrapped his legs around me and we just held, and we were crying. And we said things in each other’s ears. And it was exactly like that. In fact, in the aftermath of that I regretted that no one had taken a picture of that. But they got it right.”
The story the film does not tell is what happened next – how their friendship persisted in the years and decades that followed. Having escaped to Thailand, Dith emigrated to the US with Schanberg’s support. There he was reunited with his wife and children and became a successful photographer with the New York Times, where Schanberg was a columnist. “Our friendship afterward – it was a friendship cast in cement,” he says. “We didn’t always see each other a lot – he lived for his latter years in New Jersey. But every time we met there was no space between. It was as if there had been no absence. And we were just bonded for life. He started saying, you’re my brother, and I thought, I don’t have a brother – I mean a biological brother. And I said, he’s right – he is my brother, so that’s how we spoke about each other.”
It is now 26 years since The Killing Fields and the story of their friendship does at last have an ending. Dith was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer early in 2008, sadly dying of the disease in March that year at the age of 65. Shortly after the diagnosis, Dith was hospitalised, and in these final weeks he and Schanberg were perhaps closer than ever. “I would come down every other day, sometimes every day, from New York – this was in New Jersey – and I would visit with him and we would tell stories.” For the first time in the entire interview, Schanberg’s rapid speech slows as he attempts to describe how he felt when he realised Dith was dying. “I knew that something very, very important to me was happening. I hate to say this – but a bigger part of my life was leaving me than I remember when my mother and father died. You know, I loved my mother and father and my father is still my role model. But somehow this was really – his blood was in my circulatory system and vice versa.”
“It was awful, the last few weeks,” Schanberg admits, and his voice is raw with emotion as he recalls them. But one incident sticks out that seems to sum it all up. “One day, I was in a way trying to tell him how I felt about – that he was going away. I was trying to make it light. He had brought up the subject that day, he knew he was going to die. And I said, you know, you’re going away. So how will we communicate? It was sort of like, you know, a half silly jest. And he just – he thought. That was Pran. And so, I don’t know, 20 seconds later, he looks up – he’s just sitting there, lying in bed – and he looked up and he said: I’ll send you my dreams. And I said: I’ll send you mine.”
All photographs accompanying this article are published with permission from Sydney Schanberg.
