Noël Quidu

In April 2008, after a ten year reign of terror, after 13 000 people had died, the Maoist rebels, supported by an ever more impoverished and starving population, took control by being voted into power, without a single shot being fired, even though there was the sinister threat of guerilla forces returning. Quidu’s photos tell the tale of the perilous changeover in Nepal, the country wedged between democratic India, China with its rampant, totalitarian capitalism, and the occupied Tibet. His photos show the situation as it is – embarrassing and politically incorrect – a situation that the world would rather not see, bearing the mark of the ideology of Chairman Mao, present as a paternal figure watching over the vulnerable people of this land, with 60% illiterate and 40% living beneath the poverty line. On April 10, 2008, the Maoist Communist Party of Nepal won the elections for the Constituent Assembly, but it now has to reach points of reconciliation and agreement with the other parties that are not prepared to embrace such radical change. Noël Quidu was in Katmandu when victory was announced. “Prachanda the Terrible”, once leader of the Popular Liberation Army (classified as a terrorist organization by the USA), is now protected by the army which had pursued him for ten years. Prachanda does not smile. The expression on his face, like the faces of Maoist dignitaries and supporters, is impassive, callous and determined. August 15th, the Prime Minister of Nepal is elected by a crushing majority at the constitutional assembly.

Tens of thousands of young people leading aimless lives had joined the Maoist forces in 2006 when the rebels became an official political force. In Pokhara, the Young Communist League repossessed private property and crushed rocks to build a strange road around the lake. In the evening, members would take part in sessions of self-criticism and denunciation of others, just as people had done at the peak of the Cultural Revolution. Before long there were nearly a million members in Nepal, including some who had been corrupt fighters, untrained for anything other than conflict.

Ever since the violent repression by Chinese armed forces in Lhassa in March this year, the Dalai Lama’s non-violent army continues its combat virtually every day in Katmandu. Tibetan refugees hold peaceful demonstrations outside the Chinese embassy, and these are broken up, with great violence, by the Nepalese police, following orders that obviously, albeit not officially, come from Beijing. The protests have only stopped once, at the time of the earthquake in Szechwan, when demonstrators paused to pray for the victims in China. On august 8th, the Olympic Games were being opened and 1400 of them were arrested. The peace-loving Tibetans, already forced to leave their country under Mao’s regime, may perhaps be confronted with the same dilemma. Noël Quidu was there reporting every day, determined that no one should ignore the fact that the global economy is relentlessly prevailing the policy of peace which has advocated for almost half a century by the Dalai Lama.

On June 11, after a speech repenting for the past and offering vague apologies, the man who was once King Gyanendra left Narayanhiti Palace where the Shah dynasty had reigned for 239 years, turning his back forever on the red brocade throne, without giving a single answer to any of the questions which journalists attempted to ask, seeking answers for the people of Nepal. The journalists then took turns to photograph one another perched on the red throne, there where the now reviled king, a very distant and vague incarnation of Vishnu, had once been the sole person endowed with the divine right to place his majestic derriere. The pictures which Noël Quidu took that evening are clearly the most cheerful in this grim story, but they and the others report the tragic truth as it was at the time… A temporary time of happiness in a country where the first communist revolution of the XXIth century seems to be coming up like something we thought resolved for ever.

Claudine Vernier-Palliez