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The Hilton hotel was still in flames. Carcasses of government buildings gaped, their innards exposed. The few motorcycles and cars that dared to break a curfew had to navigate a series of checkpoints patrolled by soldiers, their fingers on the triggers of their rifles.
Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, is normally a city of noise and commerce, where gods survey the jammed traffic from brightly lit roadside temples. On Thursday, soon after clashes between security forces and protesters claimed dozens of lives and ripped the institutional heart out of the city, much of Kathmandu was swaddled in suspense and silence, save the crunch of shattered glass underfoot.
Nepal is now a country without a functioning government. No one seems to know where the president is. The prime minister has resigned.
Following negotiations between the army and the young “Gen Z” protesters, former chief justice Sushila Karki was sworn in as Nepal’s interim prime minister on Friday, becoming the first woman to lead the country. She is tasked with holding fresh elections to the lower house of parliament by March.
Nepali army personnel and firefighters outside the Hilton Kathmandu hotel after it was burned during days of riots and political upheaval.Credit: Atul Loke/The New York Times
Many of the capital’s mighty institutions – a palace complex turned seat of government, the Supreme Court, ministry buildings – lay in ruins. Reams of documents, banknotes and official finery were turned to ash. A former prime minister and his wife, who is the foreign minister, were attacked by a mob. Another former prime minister’s wife suffered extreme burns and underwent surgery on Thursday.
“I never imagined this, no one could have imagined this,” said Lance Corporal Ramesh Tamang, who stood outside the Hilton hotel, where flames still spurted out of blackened rooms. He had not slept in four days, he said, having been deployed to fight blazes at a succession of buildings. At the Hilton, the firefighting soldiers had already used up 25 tankers’ worth of water to power their hose, but the flames had not yet been extinguished. Panes of glass broke off the building and crashed onto the road.
Former Supreme Court chief justice Sushila Karki (right) greets Nepalese President Ram Chandra Poudel after taking the oath as interim prime minister on Friday.Credit: AP
Also at risk of going up in smoke were the dreams of the Gen Z protesters, who began their rallies on Monday to uproot corruption and halt the revolving door of leadership that has kept power in this Himalayan country shifting among three old men for the past decade. What started as youthful pushback against a government ban on social media platforms turned into a bloodbath. At least 51 people have been killed and more than 1300 injured.
Outside the gate of the Maharajgunj Medical Campus on Thursday evening, a few dozen mourners gathered soon after sunset, during a brief reprieve from the curfew, to light candles on the pavement and remember those who had died three days earlier. Portraits of 11 young people were set behind a small field of candles as grieving relatives took turns to speak.
Fresh graffiti on an underpass near the hospital asked in English: “What to do with police who murder?”
Protesters celebrated as Kathmandu’s parliament building was set alight on Tuesday.Credit: AP
If anyone is in charge in Nepal today, it is the army, which, unlike many others in Asia, has little history of direct military rule and has so far refrained from taking the reins of power. Much of Nepal’s leadership is now under army control, their associates said, being kept in various army barracks. It is not clear whether the reason is to protect the ministers or to keep them confined.
The nation’s army chief, General Ashok Raj Sigdel, has met repeatedly with the Gen Z protesters. Two of the protesters said they first mentioned Karki as their preferred choice for leader of an interim government on Wednesday. Karki is seen as an anti-corruption crusader untethered to the political old guard.
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On Thursday, students representing the Nepali Congress party defied the nationwide curfew to chant anti-army slogans and call for President Ram Chandra Poudel to appear.
“Make our president public,” they shouted. “We won’t accept a military coup.”
Later in the day, a group of senior lawyers met the president to discuss his plan for a political future, according to one of the lawyers who did not want to be identified because of the confidential nature of the discussions. Poudel, 80, had not been seen in public since Monday’s violence, but in Nepal’s constitutional system, his role includes endorsing the head of any interim or caretaker government.
Observers say supporting Karki, the Gen Z choice, is not his preference.
On Thursday evening, 8000 soldiers from 15 districts across Nepal arrived in Kathmandu, intelligence sources said, provoking more fear and uncertainty in a capital accustomed to both emotions.
Nepal has suffered through a vicious civil war and the massacre of its royal family in 2001, both of which eventually led the country to exchange its constitutional monarchy for a parliamentary democracy. King Gyanendra Shah was dethroned in 2008. But royalist parties have been lobbying for the restoration of the monarchy, and people loyal to them took part in the recent anti-government protests.
The curfew was suspended on Thursday for a couple of hours in the morning and late afternoon, allowing residents to buy groceries, breathe the air still smoky from the widespread arson attacks, and exchange gossip about the current political cataclysm.
For some Gen Z students, the suspension of the curfew also allowed them to undertake another key mission: cleaning the city’s streets. They were dismayed at how the movement had metastasised into a frenzy of arson, vandalism and looting. The Gen Z protesters said that did not come from their ranks.
In one stretch of asphalt near a burned-out department store, a dozen teenagers squatted to scrape away an oily mound of ash spreading out from under the skeleton of a city bus.
Nepalese army personnel stand guard in Kathmandu, Nepal, after days of riots and political upheaval.Credit: NYT
“I’m a real Gen Z, we all are here, and this is not what we wanted,” said Swarnab Chowdhury, 18, a student whose surgical gloves were black from the sticky filth he and his friends were scooping away.
Chowdhury lamented that shadowy forces had filled the streets, crowding out the students. Many of the Gen Z protesters did not join the rallies on Tuesday when the burning and looting intensified, according to the protesters and to video footage of the scenes of destruction.
“We wanted a revolution, but they burned down our own country,” Chowdhury said. “We wanted to build it, and they burned it.”
Young people clean ashes from a street around a bus that was burned during days of riots and political upheaval, in Kathmandu.Credit: Atul Loke / NYT
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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