Sydney Schanberg, US journo who covered Liberation War, dies

Sydney H Schanberg, the New York Times correspondent who was among the first foreign journalists to break the news of the 1971 Bangladesh genocide committed by the Pakistani occupation army to the world, died on Saturday in New York. He was 82. Schanberg worked for the Times for 26 years and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for reporting the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, which inspired the Oscar-winning 1984 film “The Killing Fields.” 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 New York Times reported. His Cambodian colleague, photojournalist Dith Pran, was a refugee and survivor of the Cambodia genocide whose ordeal inspired Schanberg's work. In 1980, Schanberg described Dith Pran'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.” Besides Pulitzer, Schanberg won the George Folk Award for excellence in journalism twice – in 1971 and 1974 – and numerous other awards.

'Killing Fields'

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. Both were seized by the Khmer Rouge and threatened with death. Dith Pran's pleas saved Schanberg's life. The pair took refuge in the French Embassy but Dith Pran was forced to leave and was sent into the countryside. Two weeks later Schanberg was evacuated by truck to Thailand. Dith Pran eventually managed to escape to Thailand and died in 2008. It was he who coined the term “killing fields.” The Khmer Rouge was the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, during which 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.