Rotary bringing badly needed clean water to Cambodia

The Cambodia I Know- an echo report published in the April 2023 Rotary Magazine. My husband and I were honored to visit Cambodia-  Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, and our experiences during our short stay are reflected in this Rotarian article.

This interesting article describes how clean water projects are trying to improve the quality of Cambodia's drinking water by a group of Rotarians who are installing special equipment designed to operate without the need for electricity. When my husband and I were in Cambodia, we used bottle water or the local beer to protect ourselves from intestinal or weird water borne diseases. But, one night, when we decided to swim in the hotel's beautiful salt water pool. Yikes! Just the splashing water into our yes caused us to experience intestinal distress. Although the pool's aqua blue water appeared to be crystal clean, it clearly was contaminated with microbes. Nothing too serious happened to us and we quickly recovered. This article in Rotary Magazine by Chenyi Chiu describes the need for clean water in Cambodia. 

Ankor What temple in Cambodia, near Siem Reap (L'Heureux photograph)

When I first came to Cambodia from Taiwan, 11 years ago, many of my fellow Rotarians at home were unfamiliar with this land of plains and great rivers on the Indochinese Peninsula in Southeast Asia.  But, in recent months, Cambodia dominates the news headlines not only in Taiwan but also in many  other parts of Asia due to the exposure of massive criminal scam operations there. Such negative news coverage does not reflect the country I came to know, so I felt it necessary to write about my experience thee to show a different side of Cambodia rom the perspective of a Rotarian.  More importantly, I want to shed light on the role Rotary is playing in improving local communities.

As illustrated by the grandeur of the famed Angkor Wat (near Siem Reap), an ancient Buddhist temple complex designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Cambodia was home to a flourishing civilization that can be traced ack more than 4,000 years.  It has a wealth of natural beauty, from sunny beaches and pristine forests to expensive lakes and scenic islands (Maine Writer- but a very humid and hot weather climate.) Moreover, the capital Phnom Penh was known at one time as Le Petit Paris de L'est (The Little Paris of the East.)  The country has a complex history marked by periods of peace and prosperity, colonialism, civil wars and destructive political turbulence.

The first Rotary club was chartered in Phnom Penh as early as 1957, four years after Cambodia gained independence from France. The club dissolved during a series of civil wars in the 1970s. A Communist insurgent group, the Khmer Rouge, seized power in 1975, and established a national government headed by Pol Pot, whose brutal rule led to the deaths of an estimated 2 million people.

By the time the Khmer Rouge was overthrown in 1979, most of the population lived in dire poverty. Cambodia is now among the least developed countries in Asia. 

Rotary returned to Cambodia in 1995, after the country had entered an era of relative political stability under a constitutional monarchy.

A new Rotary Club of Phnom Penh was chartered that year. As Cambodia experiences rapid growth, Rotary has expanded and the country now has none clubs with about 200 members. 

In the early days, most Rotary members were European and North American expats. At the end of 2016, under Rotary District 3350, which covers Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, a group of Taiwanese and other Chinese-speaking professionals who worked and lived in Cambodia formed the Chinese-speaking Rotary Club of Phnom Penh Capital. The club has served as a bridge between Rotary clubs in Cambodia and Taiwan and collaboration has flourished. Joint service projects ae being implemented every year. 

I became the president of the Rotary Club of Phen Capital in 2018.  During my year, the club initiated a water and sanitation program with the Rotary Club of Taipei Everpeace in District 3481.  It was one of the most memorable events during my journey in Rotary.

The project took place on Tonie Sap Lake, the largest feshwaer lake in Southeast Asia. Near the Ankor Wat temple, it is on of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world.  Villagers live in houses resting on long stills in he water or on tied-up bamboo rafts floating on the lake. While they rely on the lake water or cooking and drinking, they also discharge kitchen and bathroom waste into the lake. Oftentimes, I would see a woman washing vegetables and rice with water from the lake while her neighbor was cleaning a chamber pot nearby. As a result, the lake turns turbid an unclean. Microbial pollution causes severe disease infections. For the villagers, having a glass of clean drinking water was a luxury, a dream.

We partnered with fellow Rotarians in Taiwan to provide water purification equipment for villagers.  I worked closely with Wang Lee-Yuan, past president of the Taipei Everpeace club, and applied for a global grant from The Rotary Foundation. The grant allowed us to purchase the purification equipment and install it in five floating villages. The systems, developed by a Taiwanese company, can be reused for more than five years and they work without electricity, which is not available in the floating villages.

The project was designed to benefit at least 10,000 villagers. Before installation, we made plans to provide training about how to use and maintain the equipment. 

Traveling to the scattered villages was challenging. A few times, we were stranded on Tonie Sap Lake at night and had to wait for locals to rescue us. Such risks and challenges were worth it when we saw clear water gushing out of the purification equipment and shimmering under the bright sun.  

Children crowded around the machine and happily drank the water.

A girl handed me an empty bottle, asking me to fill it up for her.  As we drank the water, together, I felt the humanity of Rotary. 

Thanks to Rotary, having a glass of clean water is no longer a dream for thousands of people around Tonie Sap Lake.  It is a reality.  

By Chenyi Chiu, past president of the Rotary Club of Phnom Penh Capital. 

A message about genocide from the Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center

Recognizing global ways to prevent genocide

Genocide Awareness and Prevention! A message from the Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center in Portland, Maine - Reza Jalali.


April is the cruelest month..." begins the first line of T.S. Eliot’s poem, "The Waste Land." Many believe the poem’s themes of memory, contrast, and post-war despair offer a chaotic view of the world. One wonders if the poet had the current time in mind when penning the poem. At a personal level, living as an immigrant through cold, long Maine winters, waiting for the warm spring weather can be merciless.

April is the month of Genocide Awareness and Prevention. Every April, we remember days of remembrance for the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide and Armenian and those in Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur and against the Kurds of Iraq. These days, the ongoing violence and atrocities in Ukraine remind us of why remembering past genocides and committing to prevent them in the future is so critical. And we are yet to recognize genocides against the native peoples of North America.


Reza Jalali

The Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Rwandan Genocide, which is also called Kwibuka, was observed by the local Rwandan community in a well-attended event at the University of Southern Maine. The Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center participated in the event, to stand in solidarity with our Rwandan neighbors. António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, stated that the genocide in Rwanda was neither an accident, nor unavoidable. “As we remember the bloodshed 28 years ago, we must recognize that we always have a choice: To choose humanity over hatred, compassion over cruelty, courage over complacency,” said Guterres.

A month earlier, we at GPIWC assisted two Ukrainians to seeking protection. Our efforts to bring attention to the plight of the world’s victims of genocides and the innocents displaced by wars, persecution, and climate change continue by publishing a Op-Ed on the war in Ukraine, tabling at the Khmer New Year in Buxton, attending the Rwandan Day of Remembrance, and supporting our Muslim neighbors during the Holy Month of Ramadan by publishing and distributing the Ramadan timetable.

We have been busy at GPIWC; the new food initiative, supported by Good Shepherd Food Bank and other partners, is nearing implementation. Our iEnglish team, in partnership with the nonprofit In Her Presence and South Portland Adult Ed, is providing four new in-person classes for the asylum seekers staying in hotels in Portland and South Portland. Applications for our zero-interest microloan program are being received and processed. Plans to bring free family-friendly and culturally appropriate concerts and performances, New Mainers on Stage, are moving rapidly forward. New staff members have been hired. We are grateful that new members volunteered to join our Board of Directors and bring their expertise to help carry our mission. Foundations and the business community continue to support us financially. Their generosity and that of individual donors make us feel proud of our city and state. April or not, the community continues to shower us with the kind of kindness and generosity that our state is known for. Onward we march, for we believe we are stronger when we work together.

Reza Jalali GPIWC Executive Director

Labels: Cambodia, Reza Jalali, T.S. Eliot

Cambodia on May 20 - National Day of Remembrance

Killing Fields in Cambodia

https://www.aptuitiv.com/portfolio/item/maine-bicentennial

Khmer Rouge - "...an estimated 1.7 to 2 million people were killed including ethnic minorities, Buddhists and Cham Muslims died under his regime."

How Cambodia’s Day of Remembrance for Genocide Victims Has Always Been Complicated by Politics


BY ANDY KOPSA  May 20, 2019 in TIME
Reenactments of the Khmer Rouge genocide are annual events in Cambodia. On the grounds of the famous killing fields of Choeung Ek, outside the capital of Phnom Penh, a troupe of young performers will take their positions on an open field. The loudspeakers will blare haunting music and words of hate. Actors carrying wooden machine guns will simulate the mass murder of civilians. Children aren’t spared and neither are the elderly. It is May 20, the National Day of Remembrance.

The annual observance marks the day in 1975 when the communist regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge began the mass killings of the Cambodian genocide. 

Such national days of remembrance are often a key part of confronting and acknowledging a troubling past; Germany’s decision to create a day to remember the Holocaust, for example, has been seen as an important step forward. 

But Cambodia’s version is complicated by the purpose the day has served for the governments that followed the Khmer Rouge — and the questions it raises are profound: What does it mean when a government decrees that the past must be remembered in a certain way? And how do you memorialize something you can’t forget?

Pol Pot — the nom de guerre of a man named Saloth Sar — had rapidly climbed the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia’s “red communists,” in the 1960s, and became the leader of the guerrilla fighters who orchestrated the systematic take-over of the country in the 1970s. Starting in the northern provinces, the regime worked its way to Phnom Penh. In April of 1975, they seized the city and forced residents to evacuate. By late afternoon the wide boulevards of the city were emptied of cars and filled with a procession of soldiers and trucks loaded with concertina wire and weapons. Families fanned out from the city on foot, not knowing where they were meant to go. Many, falsely told they could return in a few days, left with only the clothing they wore.

Genocide- Killing Fields of Cambodia

By that point, Cambodia had already been devastated by wars from within and without: the First Indochina War, the Vietnam War and their own civil war. A flood of refugees spilled into Thailand while others from the countryside came to Phnom Penh. 

Rice fields were decimated, livelihoods were lost and people went hungry. The Khmer Rouge stepped into the breach, espousing a vision of a communist utopia. The struggling rural farmer would get the same food, shelter and life as the city-dwelling doctor. It was an easy sell with horrific consequences.

Mass killings of Cambodians began about a month after Phnom Penh fell. Pol Pot convinced a destroyed nation to join an agrarian revolution turned genocide; an estimated 1.7 to 2 million people were killed including ethnic minorities, Buddhists and Cham Muslims died under his regime.

The official remembrance of those events began to take shape almost immediately after Cambodia was liberated from the Khmer Rouge in 1979, as the new government looked for ways to legitimize itself. The newly formed People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) began distancing itself from the regime — at least outwardly, as many of its own leaders had been officers in the Khmer Rouge too. The Day of Remembrance, first staged in 1984, was originally known as The National Day of Hatred Against the Genocidal Pol Pot-Ieng Sary-Khieu Samphan clique and the Sihanouk-Son Sann Reactionary Groups.

Anthropologist Alex Hinton has written that the Day of Hate was a way for the PRK to keep anger toward the Khmer Rouge active so that they could put it to use for their own political purposes if needed. In his book Voices from S-21, historian David Chandler writes the PRK “worked hard to focus people’s anger onto the ‘genocidal clique’ that had governed Cambodia,” as the “new government based its legitimacy on the fact that it had come to power by toppling the Khmer Rouge [though] it was in no position to condemn the entire movement, since so many prominent PRK figures had been Khmer Rouge themselves.”

In the 1980s and ‘90s, the Day of Hate was staged on a massive scale. Paper effigies of Pol Pot were burned and survivors told the true horror stories of their lives under the Khmer Rouge. These events were critical to the PRK leadership reinventing itself, eventually becoming the Cambodia People’s Party of today, the party of Prime Minster Hun Sen. 

While attendance wasn’t compulsory at the original days of anger, it was strongly encouraged and with the help of local authorities’ mass turnout was assured. After years of war and the Khmer Rouge, the people were left starving in a land littered with landmines and mass graves. The day of hate fell into place easily on this backdrop.

But in 2018, Prime Minister Hun Sen decreed that May 20 was no longer the day of hate. Instead, it would be the National Day of Remembrance. Hun Sen not only changed the official name of the holiday, he told reporters it was now set aside to “respect and pray for the victims who passed away from Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime.”

His decree, timed during an election year, also created a time to praise the Cambodian People’s Party for all its “achievements” since the DK was overthrown — and to cast Hun Sen as protecting citizens from the not-so-distant terror. Hun Sen “has a particular knack for playing on fears of a return to the dark days of massacres and civil war,” writes Sebastian Strangio, an independent journalist and author of Hun Sen’s Cambodia.

However, a 2016 Open Society Justice Initiative Report on Cambodia’s war-crimes tribunal found that at least two court cases stemming from the genocide fell apart because they could “embarrass” the CPP and Hun Sen by revealing ties to former Khmer Rouge members.

But, with or without an official day to remember the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, memories of the atrocities are woven through the daily lives of those who survived the regime and their descendants.

Nowhere is that fact clearer than at the secret prison known as Tuol Sleng, or S-21, where Pol Pot sent officers and officials to be tortured. Today, it’s the site of a genocide museum. When the Vietnamese liberated the city, they found piles of bodies at S-21; some estimates say 18,000 people were killed there alone. The museum is designed to be tourist-friendly. Visitors are given headphones and guided through the complex via audio tour. Photos of S-21 victims paper the walls but the brutality of the Khmer Rouge is hard to see behind Plexiglas.

Chheng Samin, one of the employees there, was born in a pagoda three months after the evacuation of Phnom Penh; she says soldiers forced her mother to return to work the morning after Samin was born. She now has two children of her own, and says she is grateful her children have happy childhood memories far different than her own.

“My grandmother died during the Khmer Rouge and I remember thinking ‘don’t put my grandma in that boat and take her away,’” Samin told me, laughing at her 3-year-old self, a girl who thought a casket was a ship.

Not far from Tuol Sleng is a one of the twenty thousand or so killing fields of the genocide. Choeung Ek on the outskirts of Phnom Penh is perhaps the most well know. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge it was a collection of abandoned buildings and a field of bodies.

Now it is a tourist destination too. An ornate stupa surrounds a stories high scaffold, each level lined with human skulls. Walking the grounds visitors are guided through buildings and alongside unexcavated fields; a shirt or dress held by the gnarled roots of a banyan tree like an insect preserved in amber.

There, on May 20, tourists will again join scores of saffron-robed monks and local residents to watch the performers act out Khmer Rouge atrocities with appropriate horror.

But for people like Samin, memories of the Khmer Rouge are more personal, and perpetually close to the surface. I asked her if working at the museum as a survivor of the genocide was difficult. For the most part, it isn’t, she tells me — but one thing does get to her. In the main hall, an iconic photo is displayed, of a mother holding her baby, cataloging their arrival at S-21. That’s hard for her to see some days. “That,” she said, “could have been my mom and me.”

Andy Kopsa is a reporter based in New York City.

Update on The Killing Fields 20 years post mortem

Cambodia ~ Bearing Witness to the Killing Fields Horror now 20 years after the death of the genocide's leader Po Pot. 

How do survivors find healing? Chum Mey, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, walks past a portrait of Nuon Chea, a former Khmer Rouge leader. AP Photo/Heng Sinith

Bearing witness to Cambodia’s horror, 20 years after Pol Pot’s death April 15, 2018 

Twenty years ago, on April 15, 1998, Pol Pot, the leader of Cambodia’s genocidal government during the late 1970s, died in his sleep at the age of 73. 

Mountains of skulls the result of the genocide during the reign of terror by the Khmer Route in Cambodia

Born Saloth Sar, Pol Pot was never held accountable for the crimes committed during the three years, eight months and 20 days his Khmer Rouge government subjected the Cambodian population to a reign of terror. Almost 2 million people, one-fourth of the country’s population, perished during this time from starvation, disease and execution.

In the search for truth and justice, many Cambodian survivors have looked to the U.N.-assisted tribunal currently in progress in the capital city Phnom Penh. 

Convened in 2006, the tribunal has sentenced the head of the main Khmer Rouge torture center to life in prison.

The tribunal’s second trial is nearing completion and is expected to result in life sentences for two additional high ranking Khmer Rouge leaders as well. At that point, the tribunal will mostly likely close its doors, and the U.N.-appointed judges and lawyers will go home. 

Tragically, the tribunal is a classic example of “justice delayed is justice denied.”

For the past 30 years, I have studied the legal, political and literary responses to the Cambodian genocide. It is the literary responses – accounts written by survivors themselves – that show how in breaking their silence and in speaking on behalf of those who died, they were able to seek justice and healing.

The Killing Fields

Two important texts, Haing Ngor’s “A Cambodian Odyssey,” published in 1987, and Vann Nath’s “A Cambodian Prison Portrait,” published 11 years later, reveal the extraordinary events that led to their writing and publication, as well as the authors’ reasons for recording their literary testimony.

Vann Nath explains a painting depicting torture at his exhibition in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. AP Photo/Heng Sinith

Before the Khmer Rouge took power on April 17, 1975, Haing Ngor was a successful gynecologist at a medical clinic in Phnom Penh. During the genocide, Ngor was arrested and severely tortured by the Khmer Rouge on three separate occasions. Each time, Ngor’s wife Huoy nursed him back to health from the brink of death. Ironically, near the end of the genocide, Huoy died in childbirth, because Ngor lacked the simple medical equipment to save her and their first child.

Ngor was able to survive the genocide. He was given refugee status by the American government and resettled in Long Beach, California, which has the largest population of Cambodians in the United States. However, he continued to be racked by guilt over not being able to save Huoy’s life.

In the early 1980s, the first film about the Cambodian genocide, “The Killing Fields,” was made based on the book by New York Times war correspondent Sydney Schanberg, who reported on the Vietnam War from Phnom Penh. In casting the role of Dith Pran, Schanberg’s Cambodian translator, Ngor was selected out of a crowd at a Cambodian wedding in Los Angeles.

Despite no previous acting experience, Ngor won the 1985 Academy Award for best supporting actor. 

Ngor’s instant fame from wining the Oscar transformed him from an anonymous survivor into the world’s most prominent witness of the Cambodian genocide.

Two years later, Warner Books published his 500-page literary testimony, “A Cambodian Odyssey,” which describes the conditions of extremity under the Khmer Rouge and specifically chronicles his relationship with Huoy, from the time they met prior to 1975, until her tragic death during the genocide.

Bearing witness to Huoy’s senseless death was essential to Ngor’s process of healing. His newly acquired status as an Oscar-winning actor provided him with the platform to affirm the truth of the Khmer Rouge’s crimes. By identifying the victims and perpetrators of the genocide, he attempted to fulfill his responsibility to Huoy and his family members who died. In the book’s introduction, Ngor states:

“I have been many things in life: a medical doctor … a Hollywood actor. But nothing has shaped my life as much as surviving the Pol Pot regime. I am a survivor of the Cambodian holocaust. That’s who I am.”

Prison Portrait

The second book to highlight is “A Cambodian Prison Portrait,” written by Vann Nath, a painter by trade before the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975. During the genocide, Nath was arrested and sent to Tuol Sleng prison, where approximately 15,000 people were forced to confess to bogus crimes under torture and subsequently executed. Nath was spared execution at the last moment in order to paint portraits of Pol Pot.

Within a year, the Khmer Rouge regime was removed from power by Vietnamese forces, and Tuol Sleng was transformed into a museum to show the world the atrocities that took place there during the genocide. As one of only seven prisoners known to have survived Tuol Sleng, Nath was asked to paint the scenes of torture and execution he had witnessed to be displayed at the museum.

Deeply traumatized by his year in captivity at Tuol Sleng, Nath later tried to rebuild his shattered life and opened a small coffee shop in downtown Phnom Penh. Two humanitarian workers who frequented the coffee shop befriended Nath and convinced him to tell his story, resulting in the writing and publication of “Prison Portrait,” in 1998.

In 2009, Nath also served as a primary witness at the U.N.-assisted tribunal during the trial of Duch, the Tuol Sleng prison chief, who was eventually sentenced to life in prison. Similar to Ngor, informing the world of the conditions at Tuol Sleng fulfilled a deep responsibility to speak on behalf of those who suffered and died under the Khmer Rouge.

By publishing their personal accounts, as I found in my research, survivors attempt to fulfill a deep responsibility to speak on behalf of those who died. In doing so, they begin to assert some control over the traumatic memories that haunt their lives. These writers act against forgetting in the hope that the world will never allow another Pol Pot to try to silence the voice of the people.

Editor’s note: in a previous version of this article there was an inadvertent typo in the year of Vann Nath serving as a primary witness. It has been corrected to 2009.

When leaders murder their own people

http://oneturkeyrun.blogspot.com/2016/12/aleppo-and-cambodia.html

I posted the above link on my Maine Writer Blog. It's titled "Aleppo and Cambodia".
Po Pot was a Cambodian who murdered his own people.
Assad is a Syrian who is destroying his own nation.
Both of them being the perpetrators of evil ambition.

YouTube interview with Martha Gellhorne - reference Khmer Rouge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj9D3GIczW4

In this YouTube interview (link above) dated 1983, Gellhorn speaks candidly about her experience entering Dachau Concentration Camp, a chilling first person history.

Moreover, she described the "stupidity" (in her words) of the 1970s, political situation in Vietnam, whereby it became the Vietnamese, who defeated the US in their nation, that were then the liberators of the Cambodian people, who were suffering from the terrorism inflicted on them by the Khmer Rouge.

Martha Ellis Gellhorn was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist, who is now considered one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. She was one of writer Ernest Hemingway's wives.

Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway

Wikipedia

Born: November 8, 1908, St. Louis, MO
Died: February 15, 1998, London, United Kingdom
Spouse: T.S. Mathews (m. 1954–1963), Ernest Hemingway (m. 1940–1945), Bertrand de Jouvenel (m. 1933)
Parents: Edna Gellhorn, George Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn was a distinguished war correspondent who covered every war that occurred across the globe over a period extending nearly 60 years.

Born in 1908 in St. Louis, Missouri, Martha Gellhorn began her writing career as a crime writer in the late 1920s. 

Her storied life as a war reporter began when she met Ernest Hemingway in late 1936, and she traveled with him to Madrid the following year to cover the Spanish Civil War. Gellhorn went on to cover every war that broke out during her lifetime, until the mid-1990s when her health began to give out. Stricken with cancer, she committed suicide in 1998.

Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway

Martha Gellhorn was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 8, 1908. She attended Bryn Mawr College, in Philadelphia, but dropped out in 1927 to pursue journalism, writing early on for New Republic. She soon moved to Paris, working for various publications and joining the United Press Bureau, where she sought to become a foreign correspondent. While there, she aligned herself with the pacifist movement and wrote a book about her experiences in a novel, What Mad Pursuit (1934).

When Gellhorn returned to the United States, she was hired as an investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, who sent her around the country to document the impact of the Great Depression. Her reports caught the eye of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the two women became friends for life. 

Gellhorn turned what she had witnessed into another work of fiction, The Trouble I've Seen (1936). The same year her book was published, she met Ernest Hemingway in a bar in Key West, Florida, and within months she was traveling with Hemingway to Spain to cover the rise of fascism and the Spanish Civil War for Collier’s Weekly. In 1940, Hemingway and Gellhorn were married, and he dedicated his Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bells Toll (1940), to her.

Covering WWII and Vietnam

Gellhorn soon went to Western Europe to cover World War II, and in 1944 she allegedly stowed away on a hospital ship to report on the D-Day landings. The next year, she entered Dachau with American troops for the liberation of the infamous concentration camp (that same year, she and Hemingway split up), and her harrowing account was a landmark piece of journalism.

In 1966, she covered the war in Vietnam, which she found supremely disturbing and horrific, full of victims on both sides of the battles lines. In the 1980s she continued to travel extensively, writing about the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the U.S. invasion of Panama, and in the mid-1990s she went to Brazil to write about street children there. 

That would be her last significant article before her death, as, dying of cancer, she took her own life in 1998.

Sydney Schanberg obituary 1934-1016

Sadly, I'm just learning about the work of Sydney Schanberg through his obituary.  I regret never having the opportunity to meet him, because I certainly would have appreciated a conversation about Cambodia.

As the evil dictator Pol Pot's Maoist guerrillas closed in on Phnom Penh in the spring of 1975, Sydney Schanberg's editors at The New York Times instructed him to leave the Cambodian capital. The veteran war journalist ignored the order and together with his Cambodian interpreter Dith Pran, he continued reporting.  

Within days of the Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge seizing the capital city, Dith would be expelled to the contryside, along with millions of other educated and urban Cambodians- the start of Pol Pot's genocidal attempt to creat an agrarian utopia. 

Schanberg won a Pulitzer for his reports on the Khmer Rouge and Dith's remarkable survival story, which inspired the 1984 film, "The Killing Fields".  Dith's mission, "was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through," he wrote. "It became my mission too."

Killing Fields journalist Sydney Schanberg dies at 82- BBCNews

US journalist Sydney Schanberg, whose reporting inspired the Oscar-winning Hollywood film, The Killing Fields,  died at the age of 82, the New York Times reports.

Schanberg worked for the Times and won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge in 1975.

His colleague, Dith Pran, was unable to leave and his four-year ordeal inspired Schanberg's work.

Sydney Schanberg 1934-2916 died in Poughkeepsie NY

Schanberg died in Poughkeepsie after a heart attack earlier in the week.

His death was confirmed by Charles Kaiser, a friend and former Times reporter, the paper said.

In 1980, Schanberg described his Cambodian colleague's ordeal of torture and starvation at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in a magazine article, and later a book called The Death and Life of Dith Pran.

Oscar awards

Pictures of some of the victims of the Khmer Rouge reign of terror

In 1975, Schanberg and Dith Pran ignored directives from Times editors to evacuate and stayed in Cambodia as almost all Western diplomats and journalists fled.

Born in Clinton, Massachusettes, Schanberg joined the Times as a copy boy in 1959, and "rose quickly  through the organization," said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.) He reported on the civil war in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971, and met Dith a year later while covering the US bombing of North Vietnamese sanctuaries inside Camobida.  Four years after the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, "there was no news of Dith," said The New York Times.  Racked with guild, Schangergtook time off to write about his experiences and to help Dith's wife and children to settle in the US. 

Then, in 1979, word arrived that Dith had escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand. He had endured unimaginable hardship, surviving beatings, back breaking labor, and a diet of insects, rodants and as litle as a tablespoon of rice a day.  

Schanberg immediately flew to Thailand and arranged for his friend to move to the US. Dith died in 2008.

The Khmer Rouge was the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, during which time, it was responsible for one of the worst mass killings of the 20th Century. The genocide claimed the lives of more than a million people - some estimates say up to 2.5 million.

Under the Maoist leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge tried to take Cambodia back to the Middle Ages, forcing millions of people from the cities to work on communal farms in the countryside.

But the attempt at social engineering had a terrible cost, and whole families died from execution, starvation, disease and overwork.

Schanberg began writing a column about New York City for the Times, in 1981, said The Washington Post. But, the "abrasive, headstrong manner" that had served him well overseas led to clashes with his bosses, and his column was canceled in 1985. Schanberg went on to write for other outlets and became a mentor to young journalists, but he never turly got over the horrors of Cambodia. "You tell yourself things in order to function, but you're going to break down," he said.  

"Eventually, you need to find room where you can sit alone and cry."