[Reader-list] Fwd: The secret life of a doomed hotel: remembering Islamabad's Marriott

[Iram Ghufran]

Fwd:

An obit to the Marriott by ABC's Foreign Correspondent.

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http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/22/2370953.htm?section=world

It's hard not to get emotional and very difficult to play the 
dispassionate journalist as I sit here, watching the Marriott Hotel burn 
on my computer screen courtesy of online news. Initial reports say 
rescuers still can't reach the upper floors. How many colleagues, 
friends, acquaintances lie buried in the wreckage is unclear.

It's the holy month of Ramadan, and the suicide truck bomber struck in 
the evening, just as hundreds of people would have been gathering to 
break the daily fast. Having attended such gatherings at the hotel, I 
suspect most of the crowd would not have been the Western infidels so 
detested by the extremists, but Pakistanis - and Muslims.

For me all roads once led to the Marriott, in Islamabad, capital of 
Pakistan. For six years the hotel was like a second home - as I worked 
on assignments in Pakistan or stopped off in transit on my way back to 
Australia from the madness of neighbouring Afghanistan.

Architecturally, the hotel building was unremarkable, 1970s vintage. But 
location is everything, and the Marriott was minutes away from the 
National Assembly, the Prime Minister's residence, Government 
bureaucracy and the headquarters of Pakistan's all-powerful spy agency, 
the ISI.

The billing as Islamabad's first five-star luxury hotel was somewhat 
overstated. The aesthetic of the place was no different to thousands of 
anonymous business hotels the world over. But that's my perspective. 
Outside the glass doors, the view from the street - where most of 
Pakistan's 170 million people live - the Marriott was, for many, an 
enduring symbol of everything that was wrong with their corrupt, 
dysfunctional nation.

What made this hotel special for the privileged few was the commodity 
being traded day and night in the foyer, cafes and restaurant: information.

Information, as they say, is power, and in Pakistan, power is a life and 
death struggle.

==The 'real deal'==

The Marriott, as American diplomats and spies were fond of saying, was 
"the real deal".

Hollywood may have created "Rick's Café" of Casablanca fame - a 
fictional world of intrigue - but the characters who inhabited the 
Marriott were playing out a real life drama, a latter day version of the 
"Great Game" to control Southwest Asia.

It often seemed that Pakistan was run from this hotel to the strains of 
the incessant hotel muzak.

This was a neutral ground for competing politicians, diplomats, 
warlords, drug lords, peddlers of nuclear weapons technology, and 
perhaps a few who fell into all those categories.

In a single day, I could exchange nods across the foyer with military 
strongman General Pervez Musharraf, who'd tried to convince me that his 
coup overthrowing civilian rule was necessary, or observe charismatic 
cricket star turned politician Imran Khan glide in to work the room, 
never failing to charm visiting Western journalists - despite the fact 
that so many of his countrymen had written him off as a political failure.

Alcohol was a tool of the trade even in an Islamic state such as 
Pakistan. At first it was brought to my room in a brown paper bag - 
after I filled out a government form declaring myself to be an unstable 
foreign alcoholic.

Later, hotel management discretely opened a windowless basement bar - 
one of the few venues in the capital to serve alcohol. Occasionally I'd 
disappear into this gloom for a quiet drink with the army 
officers-turned spies who were running Pakistan's secret wars in 
Afghanistan and Indian-occupied Kashmir. Many had embraced the extremist 
zeal of the militants they sought to control and exploit - yet they 
still enjoyed a scotch or a beer when I was paying.

Staggering back to my room, I'd be kept awake at night by the blaring 
music from the hotel function centre out the back, as Pakistan's leading 
families cemented alliances by marrying off their sons and daughters in 
colourful, elaborate weddings.

Then there was the hotel staff. Many had spent most of their working 
lives at the Marriott. They were happy to join in the theatre and tip me 
off when a "player" would swing in through the front doors, with a self 
important entourage armed to the teeth, all ignoring the screeches of 
the metal detector.

Nothing was impossible for them. Once, caught without transport while 
covering the fighting between Pakistan and Indian troops on Kashmir's 
"Line of Control", I was offered a hotel courtesy car, complete with 
uniformed chauffer. The elderly driver usually took diplomats wives 
shopping. Instead he found himself dodging Indian artillery fire on a 
mountain road with an increasingly anxious ABC crew. Implacable 
throughout, he only briefly displayed a flicker of anger when I 
attempted to apologise for getting him into this mess. "But I'm an 
Afridi" - he replied. This brief statement of tribal identity said it 
all: born and raised on the fierce border with Afghanistan, near the 
Khyber Pass, there was nothing he'd seen on my little expedition that 
was going to rattle him. But he chided, "You must pay for bullet holes 
or damage to hotel transport."

==Survival instincts==

I write this tonight from the safety of a suburban home in Australia. 
The floors and attic are filled with vibrantly coloured Afghan and 
Pakistan rugs bought from the carpet wallahs who ran the rug shops along 
the Marriott's ground floor arcade.

The real bargains lay far from the hotel, in their warehouses off in the 
backstreets. Most of the traders, like the owner of the Marriott, were 
from Islam's Ismaili sect: astute, outstanding businessmen and great 
survivors.

For the price of a rug and a few hours of my time sitting on a warehouse 
floor, I'd receive endless cups of tea and political tip-offs that often 
proved remarkably accurate. After all, the carpet business runs on good 
intelligence and the carpet wallahs live and work in one of the toughest 
markets in the world.

I only hope that their survival instincts didn't fail them on Saturday 
night.

Change for the Marriott came after 9/11. As the Americans gathered their 
forces to invade Afghanistan, the hotel became media headquarters of the 
world.

Hundreds of foreign media established a surreal Tower of Babel in the 
hotel. TV networks fought for space on the roof to erect plywood 
studios, guests slept on stretchers three to a room. The function centre 
became a paying dormitory - and the room rate, like the punditry, seemed 
to escalate on a daily basis.

As CNN anchors shared their insight with the world from their rooftop 
plywood stage, South American journalists down in the foyer, watching 
the broadcasts on TV, transcribed every word before relaying back to 
anxious readers back home.

The foyer transformed into the theatre of the absurd. There was the chic 
French TV crew kitted out in the flowing robes of traditional Pakistani 
shalwar kameez; and the American reporter complaining that he couldn't 
bring his gun into the hotel.

With the fall of Kabul the circus moved on, but the Marriott had changed.

After 9/11 the security barriers went up outside the hotel, but no one 
seriously believed it would stop a determined teenager on a one-way 
ticket to martyrdom.

I began to demand rooms at the back of the building, off the ground 
floor, but not so high that I couldn't climb down in an emergency. For 
many Marriott regulars, it was a case of not if, but when, it would be 
attacked. In 2004 an explosion in the foyer wounded several people, then 
last year, a security guard died after challenging a suicide bomber at 
the gate.

The Marriott Hotel was also the place where I formed friendships with 
Pakistani journalists, academics and human rights activists, all 
striving to explain the chaos of their nation to the world. Many live 
close to the hotel. They would have certainly heard the bomb go off - if 
they were fortunate enough not to have been caught in the blast.

As the chaos recedes, they will get on with the business of explaining 
the how's and the why's of this atrocity. They'll infuriate the Islamic 
extremists who tolerate no criticism of their absolutist world.

Unlike me, a privileged visitor, they choose to continue living and 
working in Pakistan, facing the constant threat of the assassin's bullet 
or bomb - over the safer, quieter life of exile. They are some of the 
bravest people I know.