Contact: Kay Fike Jones
Khamphan Pradith
A former government official who spent almost two decades as a political prisoner in his native Laos will discuss the experience and how it changed his life during an April appearance at Mississippi State University.
Now a Buddhist monk, Khamphan Pradith was vice governor of Vientiane when the Pathet Lao Communists forced him into a reeducation camp in August 1975 following the country's takeover. The communist military victory occurred in the same month that similar fates befell neighboring Vietnam and Cambodia as the Indochina War ended.
"All in a Life's Work," the title of Pradith's public lecture, begins at 7 p.m. on the 21st in the Simrall Hall auditorium. He also speaks at 2 p.m. the following day [April 22] in the Colvard Union small auditorium.
During 17 years, four months and 16 days in the grossly misnamed "seminar camp," Pradith made a promise to Buddha: help me escape and I'll become a monk.
A series of concentration camps were the centerpiece of the new Laotian regime's policy toward its enemies. Pradith, along with 10,000 other inhabitants of brutal Seminar Camp No. 5, spent long days at hard labor, barely surviving on meager rations and scant medical supplies.
In 1992, he bought his way to freedom through money raised by family members who earlier had fled to France. Crossing the Mekong River to Thailand, he found sponsors who helped him emigrate to Germany. In 1993, he came to the United States and now makes his home in a Lao Buddhist monastery in Nashville.
Educated mostly in the U.S., Pradith is a graduate of Georgetown University and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the School of Taxation in Paris.
His MSU visit is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences Colloquium Committee, the departments of philosophy and religion and geosciences, the University Honors Program, International Services Office, and the Center for International Security and Strategic Studies.
For more information, telephone Stephen Cottrell at (601) 325-8929.