‘I Will Never Forget Her Laughter,’ Girl Says

Around the world, the people she charmed and the causes that counted on her grieved for Princess Diana on Sunday.

“I will never forget her laughter,” said Diana Kresic, the 13-year-old daughter of a Bosnian land mine victim.

The girl met a smiling, compassionate Princess of Wales earlier this year when Diana toured the former Yugoslavia and Angola for a high-profile campaign against land mines - one of countless efforts by Diana to give what she had too much of - fame - to the charities and movements that got too little of it.

Her every move was chronicled, but the gossip columns and tabloid TV shows often failed to capture her true nature, said Plamenko Priganica of the U.S.-based Land Mine Survivors Network, who lives and works in Tuzla, Bosnia.

“Everybody always talked about her private life, but not enough about how she was as a human being,” a mourning Priganica said.

In Cambodia, one of the world’s most heavily mined countries, officials said they hoped her death would bolster an international campaign to end use of the lethal, crippling weapon. “This is a very great loss for the Cambodian people,” government spokesman Khieu Kanharith said.

Praising her heart

It was Diana’s role as a “queen in people’s hearts”- the title she said she most coveted - that won praise from South African President Nelson Mandela, who paid tribute to Diana as “an ambassador for victims of land mines, war orphans, the sick and needy throughout the world.”

In Calcutta, Mother Teresa honored Diana’s commitment to those less fortunate than herself. “She was very concerned for the poor. She was very anxious to do something for them. That is why she was close to me.”

David Harvey, executive director of the Washington-based national AIDS Policy Center for Children, Youth and Families, said: “With one royal handshake given to a young man with AIDS in the late 1980s, Diana forever changed the face of AIDS for the world.”

‘Blood on his hands’

Fresh waves of outrage roiled over the tabloid press at the possibility that paparazzi photographers may have contributed, at least in part, to Sunday’s fatal wreck. The tabloid “stalkerazzi,” that increasingly aggressive breed of celebrity photographer, came, for the umpteenth time in recent years, under fire as a symbol of all that is wrong about our public relationship with the well-known.

Mourners laying flowers at the gates of Buckingham Palace in London cursed photographers there to record their grief.

Diana’s brother, Earl Charles Spencer, said the press had “a direct hand” in her death.

“It would appear that every proprietor and editor of every publication that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her, encouraging greedy and ruthless individuals to risk everything in pursuit of Diana’s image, has blood on his hands today,” Spencer said.

And Hollywood stars, led by actor Tom Cruise, complained about photographers so intent on securing a dramatic photograph or piece of videotape that a death was an almost inevitable byproduct of the pursuit.

Jackson cancels concert

Singer Michael Jackson canceled a concert scheduled Sunday in Belgium that 60,000 people were to attend. Organizers said Jackson was stunned by the news of Diana’s death and unable to perform.