ladydelirium

On Assignment

HISTORY CROSSED PATHS with freelance photographer Kevin Fleming while he was covering the Sinai Peninsula for this month’s issue. On only his second foreign assignment, the 28-year-old Delaware farm boy was eyewitness to the assassination of Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat. And, he later learned, if the attack in Cairo had not taken place, the assassins may have intended to try at Mount Sinai, where Sadat was scheduled to attend a ceremony a day later�the next stop also for Fleming and author Harvey Arden. Fleming was only 25 yards from Sadat when the attack started. Was he hearing fireworks or gunshots? A grenade exploded. He knew. “I told myself: ‘Kevin, you have to hold the camera still,’ �he recalls. “It was chaotic. Bullets came from everywhere. People tumbled over chairs as they dived for cover. I saw Sadat’s photographer take his last breath.” A soldier suddenly pointed a gun into his face and screamed “No!” Fleming backed away. Another excited guard fired his pistol into the air, creating the danger of ricochet from the grandstand roof. “I would make a picture, put the camera behind my back, and move on,” he remembers. “Because I had on a coat and tie and was carrying only two cameras,” he says, “I looked like everybody else in the reviewing stand.” This shot of a wounded ambassador, along with the rest of his film, was immediately released by NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC for publication. Fleming’s photographs appeared in Newsweek and some 15 other magazines around the world; for his coverage he has been named 1981 runner-up Magazine Photographer of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association. On a previous GEOGRAPHIC assignment, Fleming was smuggled by Somali guerrillas into the Ogden over a road often mined by the Ethiopians. “One thing I have learned,” he says: “Don’t go with a preconceived idea. Try to keep calm. Let things happen.” In Apartment Madrid, they did and, unlike some others, he kept his cool. Wakens HAT CHECKERED cotton cloth we put on our heads is called krama,” the young man said�the Khmer people are familiar with it from birth and make it serve in many ways. A man will wrap it around his middle, for comfort in the evening breeze. A girl may put a pretty edge on one and give it to a young man, as a token of love. He’ll kiss it and think of her. “And then came the time when people used the krama to hang themselves.” They knew it only as Angkor, the organization. Survivors have come to know it by the name of its leader, Pol Pot. Wherever I went in the land of the Khmer�formerly Cambodia, now Kampuchea�and whatever the subject of conversation, I was to find all too poignant reminders of that recent time of horrors. How could it be otherwise, when from 1975 to 1979 multitudes were systematically done to death? “Only my mother and I are left now,” another young man told me. “My father, three brothers, and two sisters were murdered.” World opinion was shocked by estimates of a million victims. The new government speaks of three million, out of a total of approximately seven and a half million Khmer Life resurges in the land long known as Cambodia, where peasants gather rice seedlings. They can hope for a better harvest than the yields of death reaped under a Khmer Rouge regime that cost the lives of perhaps three million of their countrymen from 1975 until Vietnam invaded in December 1978. Continuing conflict clouds the future.