The Paris Liberation Museum present until the end of the year an exciting Exhibition on” Women War Photographers “, from Gerda Taro, who died on the Republican Front of the Spanish War in 1937, until Anja Niedringhaus, killed in Afghanistan in 2014. Christine Spengler, whose photograph of the bombing of Phnom Penh in 1975 opens the exhibition, had a bouquet of artificial flowers placed “in tribute to the victims of the War in Ukraine, which she cannot go to photograph “. But it was a photograph that has become emblematic of Françoise Demulder, in 1976, which was chosen from the museum’s website to report the exhibition.
During the disappearance of the reporter, in 2008, “Le Monde” admitted that it “is unfair to reduce a photographer to an image, especially in the case of Françoise Demulder, but that which she realizes in The morning of January 18, 1976 in Beirut (…) marked the profession and newspaper readers around the world “.
This photograph has nevertheless failed to be published.
the massacre of the quarantine
Françoise Demulder is 28 years old when she joined Beirut for the Gamma agency, shortly after testifying in April 1975, from the presidential palace of Saigon, the entrance to the communist troops in the former capital of South Vietnam . The Lebanese conflict was then described as “civil war”, because it mainly opposes phalangist militias, Christian confession, to an “Islamo -rogress” alliance, supported by the Palestine Liberation Organization (OLP). Yasser Arafat strives to limit the involvement of his Fedayines in the fighting, despite the mobilization of the phalangist propaganda against “the Palestinian occupation” of Lebanon. Everything switches nevertheless in January 1976, with the phalangist blockade of Tell-el-Zaatar, a Palestinian refugee camp set in the mainly Christian area of Beirut East. Rather than attacking this firmly defended camp, militiamen prefer to seize, not far from there, Forty slum , where Palestinian residents have long rubbed Kurdish and Lebanese in a community of misfortune.
This is the beginning of a form of “ethnic cleaning” by Beirut East by the phalangist forces who want to expurgate any Palestinian, even Muslim presence. On the morning of January 18, 1976, Françoise Demulder joined the Phalangist staff in Beirut East, which she left for her forties, in the company of a hooded militiaman. He orders him to stop photographing whenever civilians of all ages are murdered. The attackers are working to destroy the entire slum, to the houses delivered to the flames, then to the bulldozers, while expelling the survivors. The photo, which has become famous, is taken when about fifty Palestinians implore the pity of the phalangist, with a woman veiled in white, with hands down in a tragic prayer.
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