- Room 106 is the hotel suite occupied by The Independent
. I gave Mr Scheetz my card. What on earth did he want, I asked? Another
soldier turned to me. "I guess we don't want any more hotels blowing
up," he said. Of course. And so say all of us. But what has Room 106
got to do with it? "Security," another American said. Which,
of course, is the excuse for any raid, any military operation, any body
search, any decision taken by anyone - even President Bush - if they don't
choose to explain their behaviour.
-
- The day the 1st Armoured Division, with guns at the ready,
came to check on our man in Baghdad
-
- I was standing on my balcony in the darkness, puffing
on a fine Havana - I had just filed my day's report to The Independent's
foreign desk - when I saw the soldiers of the 1st Armoured Division padding
down the road outside.
-
- The guys at the rear were walking backwards, two officers
in the centre, all moving purposefully towards the hotel entrance. By the
time I got downstairs, Mohamed, the receptionist, was incurring the wrath
of Iraq's occupying army.
-
- "Show me the hotel register, please, Sir,"
the officer was saying. "It's in the other building," Mohamed
replied innocently. "Don't play games with me, Sir," snapped
the soldier. "I want the hotel register."
-
- I've often wondered why American soldiers do this sort
of thing - insult a guy and then add "Sir" so they can claim
they have been polite. "Mohamed is not playing games," I said.
The register is always kept in the other part of the hotel.
-
- The officer - his name was Scheetz - turned back to Mohamed.
"Who's in Room 106?" Mohamed looked at me. I looked at Scheetz.
Room 106 is the hotel suite occupied by The Independent . I gave Mr Scheetz
my card. What on earth did he want, I asked?
-
- Another soldier turned to me. "I guess we don't
want any more hotels blowing up," he said. Of course. And so say all
of us. But what has Room 106 got to do with it? "Security," another
American said. Which, of course, is the excuse for any raid, any military
operation, any body search, any decision taken by anyone - even President
Bush - if they don't choose to explain their behaviour.
-
- I walked up to my room. There were three more US soldiers
outside and three Iraqi paramilitaries of the so-called Iraqi Civil Defence
Corps. The soldier nearest my door seemed as mystified as I was, a friendly,
intelligent young man called Matt Meyers who had been in Iraq for a year,
loved soldiering, was prepared to stay longer and planned to vote - hold
your breath - for George Bush in November.
-
- He is the first American soldier I've come across in
Iraq who wants to vote for the man who sent him to this hell-hole. He came
from Seattle. Perhaps that had something to do with it.
-
- Meyers' agile brain was absorbing Arabic like a sponge
- he even had an Iraqi accent - and rather disconcertingly called his Iraqi
paramilitary sidekicks by nicknames. A big, paunchy man with an Iraqi flash
on his sleeve was dub kbir, "big bear", but the paramilitary
didn't smile when he was told to go downstairs.
-
- The 1st Armoured had even created a special logo for
the "Iraqi Civil Defence Corps", the letters ICDC in Gothic letters
with half an SS lightning flash in between. I didn't dare question the
symbolism of this. The same American unit also incorporates a death's head
skull in its various symbols, though this is a reference to the destruction
of an SS unit by the 1st Armoured Division in Normandy in 1944.
-
- More soldiers came into the hotel. Three plain-clothes
Western men wearing "Coalition Provisional Authority" badges
ran up the stairs, one of them with a South African flag on his sleeve.
Meyers didn't want to come into my room. Scheetz was told that The Independent
had been here for a year, that I was the senior correspondent and that
we weren't planning to blow up any Baghdad hotels, least of all our own.
I offered to give Meyers a copy of my book on the Lebanon war and he gave
me his address in Germany so I could send it to him when he goes home -
very reluctantly, no doubt - in May.
-
- And that should have been that. Scheetz went off to search
Room 106 in the hotel's second building - it is an empty office - and I
started chatting to the hotel staff. In front of these Iraqis, Sunnis,
Shias and Christians, I have a firm policy. Don't appear - ever - to be
fraternising with the occupying power. It's more than my life is worth.
That's when the waiter arrived with a tray covered in a white cloth and
- standing upon it - a can of Amstel beer. "It's compliments of Mr
Sheetz," he said.
-
- O Lordy, Lordy. The Iraqis looked on in silence. The
waiter looked at me sheepishly and shrugged his shoulders. What was this
for, the Iraqis were asking themselves? So was I. Mohamed, the receptionist
who had been told not to "play games", was watching me like the
proverbial hawk. I told the waiter to take the beer back and he did.
-
- So I was left with a couple of questions. What nincompoop
sent these young Americans onto the dangerous streets of night-time Baghdad
to examine a hotel register which could be looked at quietly by any discreet
visitor during the day, and to demand the identity of a guest who's been
staying here on and off for the past year? Secondly - and much more seriously
- if I could be angry when Mohamed was insulted by the American, what were
the Iraqis thinking? Another minuscule thread, I suppose, in the tapestry
called the War on Terror.
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