After I had been in Bahrain a few years I got an invitation to spend the day on board the crown prince’s yacht, along with the British ambassador, his wife, the defence attaché, and General Sir Peter de la Billiere, who had left the army after commanding British forces in Desert Storm and joined the bank I worked for. The yacht belonging to Crown Prince Hamad (now King Hamad) was an enormous floating gin palace that was moored on the exclusive west coast of the island; in fact it was so big that we were not going anywhere in it. Instead we were shown downstairs into our state rooms to change while the crown prince performed aerobatics in a helicopter above us and a speedboat was prepared for our amusement. An Egyptian boatman, Hani, was at the wheel, but he was somewhat distracted by the ambassador’s wife, who had changed into a bikini for waterskiing, and he kept leering round over his shoulder. Suddenly I noticed we were heading at speed straight for a huge metal pole. ‘Look out!’ Sir Peter and I shouted in unison, and at the same moment I jumped ship, preferring self-preservation to valour, expecting to resurface a few yards short of a fireball. At the last minute the boatman had swerved, aided perhaps by my leap overboard, and disaster was averted. Hani was quite unrepentant, thinking this a huge joke, and once ashore he clowned around with a venomous sea snake he had just fished out, waving it perilously close to the ambassadorial swimming trunks until the Bahraini sheikhs intervened and dismissed him for the afternoon. The Bahrainis were perfect hosts, but it was a glimpse into a rarefied, privileged world that belied the tensions building in their island nation. Within a year there were to be violent clashes between the police and some of the restless Shi’ite majority, who were demanding better job opportunities and a return to parliamentary democracy. The clashes continued for several years, taking over thirty lives and shaking Bahrain’s reputation as a peaceful island state.
In the early 1990s Dubai had yet to take off and Bahrain was still debatably the most popular posting in the Gulf for white-collar British expats, mostly bankers, brokers, lawyers and insurance types. The Hong Kong airline Cathay Pacific made this their regional hub and the manager was an old school friend of mine. ‘Disco’ Ron Mathison had made a name for himself at Marlborough in the late seventies, organizing summer dances with girls’ schools and reproducing John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever moves on polished school floors, in assembly halls where the curtains were drawn at seven p.m. because there was still another three hours of daylight and the dance had to end at ten. Ron had grown up in Colombia and was widely reputed to have escaped a mugging by dancing sideways down a street in Bogota. Now he was in Bahrain, living in a big villa where he sensibly sneaked off for ‘power naps’ in the dead hours between finishing work and going out clubbing, emerging full of beans and outlasting all of us into the small hours, like some premium AA battery.
One morning he rang me in my tinted-plate-glass office overlooking Manama. ‘How do you fancy skiing in Lebanon this weekend?’ It was more of a challenge than a question. Bahrain was safe, Lebanon was probably not. The Lebanese civil war had more or less petered out since the recent peace accord brokered in Saudi Arabia, but the country still bristled with armed factions and memories were fresh of Westerners being kidnapped and held for years in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Skiing in war-ravaged Lebanon sounded dodgy, but Ron had connections and he assured my friend Mark and me that they would meet us at the airport and chaperone us.
From the moment we landed in Beirut’s dusty airport in that spring of 1992 it was obvious who was in charge of this country: the Syrians. Their uniformed soldiers hung around the terminal building, their shifty-looking intelligence agents stood behind the passport kiosks, watching everyone who flew in. That week there had been a gun battle on the road from the airport into Beirut between Syrian troops and the local Lebanese gendarmes. The gendarmes had set up their own checkpoints, the Syrians wanted them removed. The Syrians won: the checkpoints were gone. As we drove through the southern slum of Bourj Al-Barajneh, where Terry Waite had been held hostage chained to a radiator by his Lebanese captors, we passed giant posters of Shi’ite religious leaders in turbans and sunglasses. ‘Rock ’n’ roll,’ said Disco Ron.
Coming from tranquil, conformist Bahrain, everything surprised us. It was supposed to be the holy month of Ramadan. Yet here we were, sitting out at a seafront café in Muslim West Beirut in the middle of the day, and not only were people breaking the fast all around us, they were drinking beer in public! Nothing prepared us for the sight of the buildings on either side of the Green Line, the street that divided East from West Beirut. Every possible surface of the once elegant French-built houses was pockmarked with bullet-holes. It was like walking through a village made of Swiss cheese. Even the small bronze statue in the middle of Martyrs’ Square, once a famous tourist landmark in the 1960s, was riddled with bullet-holes. The roads were in a dreadful state, full of potholes, and one plate-glass bank building had still not been repaired after having had every window blown out. The former US embassy was like a collapsed house of cards, its concrete storeys all slumped one on top of the other where they had been blown up by a suicide bomber nine years previously.
As we drove up into the mountains we passed men with rocket-propelled grenade launchers perched on their shoulders, standing guard at each hairpin bend. Once above the snowline this obsession with weaponry became frankly ridiculous. We checked into an alpine chalet in the resort of Faraya and trudged off to the ski slopes. Yet even here we found the ski queues patrolled by uniformed Lebanese soldiers cradling M16s. I have to say it was the most orderly ski queue I have ever seen. ‘I dare you to throw a snowball at one of them,’ said Mark. I declined, but Ron rose to the challenge, then left me to do the explaining. Lebanon is the only place I can think of where you can see the sea while you are on the ski piste, and the Lebanese told us with some pride that in happier days they would spend the morning skiing and the afternoon water-skiing. This winter the snowfall had been particularly heavy, cutting off whole villages that then had to be rescued with helicopter food-drops. But word of the ski conditions had spread to the young, rich and beautiful of Beirut, and on the day we left we passed convoys of luxury four-wheel-drive jeeps heading up the mountain, their roof-racks laden with skis.
Driving back past Beirut’s Green Line I stuck the video camera out of the window to film the shattered buildings. But as we passed the St Georges Yacht Club there was a coarse shout from the side of the road. ‘Wagaf!’ It was a Syrian soldier ordering us to stop the car. I glanced at Ali, our Lebanese driver, who looked absolutely terrified and brought the car to an abrupt halt. Had I known that I had inadvertently filmed Syria’s Military Intelligence HQ in Beirut I would have shared Ali’s concern, but as it was, when the Syrian conscript thrust out his hand to demand the tape I shook it warmly, gave him a huge smile and a traditional Arabic greeting. This took him aback at first, but he soon recovered his scowl and demanded the tape again. Unwilling to hand over all the footage we had shot up on the ski slopes, I reached into the car and handed him Dire Straits’ Greatest Hits. I was sorry to see that go too (‘Brothers In Arms’ hit the spot for Beirut), but it did the trick. My next encounter with an armed Syrian security man was to be rather more serious.
If skiing in Lebanon in the early nineties had sounded a little unhinged, then the offer of travelling round Syria with two Swedish girls was irresistible. I had yet to meet my wife and I had an unrequited interest in one of the Scandinavians. Christina was tall, blonde and slim, with a slightly aloof air that earned her the nickname the Ice Maiden. Inge was the opposite: short and hearty with a smoker’s laugh and an infectious sense of humour. Syria was a country I had always wanted to go to and they seemed to have the itinerary all worked out, so I jumped at the offer.
Stepping out of Damascus’s ageing airport was like walking back into the 1970s. Dilapidated Citroëns and other clapped-out French cars puttered along beneath ubiquitous posters of the absolute ruler, President Hafez Al-Assad. A crudely painted canvas banner was strung
up outside the terminal, reading: ‘The Syrian people have an eternal well of love that gushes for their country and their leader and which cannot be extinguished.’ I thought, who dreams up these slogans?
In Damascus, Christina and Inge stayed in the only ‘luxury’ hotel, an overpriced and soulless tower block, while I found an attractive little pension in the old quarter where vines grew on the roof terrace. I would sit out chatting with the affable owner in the evening as the sky grew pink over the Golan Heights, the dusk call to prayer reverberated over the rooftops and the swifts wheeled and screeched above us in the gathering twilight. I treasured moments like these in the Middle East.
Despite Syria’s oppressive political atmosphere – this was, after all, a place where ten years earlier the president had crushed an Islamist uprising by ordering his army to shell the town of Hama indiscriminately, killing an estimated twenty thousand people – I liked this country. Syria had few Western visitors and the people were courteous, kind and friendly. In the backstreets off the fabulous Hamadiya Souk I tracked down the brother of my Arabic teacher in Bahrain. He was a traditional barber and I watched in awe as his nimble fingers worked a taut string into constricting triangles to pluck the hairs from his customers’ cheeks. He took the Swedes and me to his favourite restaurant above the bazaar, where tables groaned with food at ridiculously low prices. A man played the ’oud and sang in exquisite Arabic as we reclined on cushions, eating iced grapes and sipping mint tea. Then the spell was broken as a posse of several well-built men in leather jackets sat down nearby. ‘Secret police,’ whispered my barber friend. Conversation dried up all round; it was time to pay up and leave.
Thanks to Christina and Inge’s punishing itinerary, we did see a lot of the country. We hired a driver and a battered limousine and headed east across the desert to Tadmur, otherwise known as Palmyra, one of the best-preserved Roman ruins in the eastern empire. On the roads we passed convoys of Syrian tanks and Russian-made anti-aircraft missile batteries, giving the impression that the whole country had been mobilized. While most other Arab countries had moved on from the era of the Arab–Israeli wars, Syria seemed to be stuck in 1973, profoundly militaristic, its whole outlook on the world seen through the prism of hostility to Israel. (The Israel–Lebanon war of 2006 was still a long way off.) Later, as a journalist, I found that many Arabs see this enduring hostility as a point in Syria’s favour, a mark of pride, but it has cost this country dear. While Jordan and Egypt – which both made controversial peace deals with Israel – are in the mainstream of international trade and politics, Syria has long been isolated, the grumpy uncle of the Arab world. For decades now, Syria has been riddled with cronyism and corruption, its centrally planned economy weighed down with the outdated baggage of a one-party state. One day, I felt sure, the full potential of this culturally rich country would be released, but not under this regime.
Palmyra was amazing, and there was no one else there. For hours we wandered undisturbed through its spectacular Roman colonnades, arches and forum. Of all the Roman ruins in the Middle East I have been lucky enough to visit – Leptis Magna in Libya, Jerash in Jordan, and El Djem in Tunisia – Palmyra must rate as one of the best. To the bemusement of the Swedish girls, I set up my video camera on a tripod with the forum behind me and gave an impromptu piece-to-camera on the history of the place. I was still three years away from switching careers from banking to broadcasting but I was already fascinated by filming. To make my films more watchable for friends back in Bahrain, I attached the headphones of my Walkman to the video camera’s microphone and played lilting Arabic music as the camera panned slowly over this ruined desert city. I had done the same in Damascus by playing excerpts from the soundtrack of Lawrence of Arabia.
From Palmyra we drove north, skirting the snow-capped mountains of Lebanon where I had gone skiing the previous month and moving on to the lush fields of the Mediterranean coast. Krak des Chevaliers, or Qala’t Al-Husn in Arabic, was a perfectly preserved Crusader castle – you could even see the grooves above the drawbridge where boiling oil was poured on to invaders if they got that far. I would have liked to go on to Aleppo, with its famous waterwheels and café culture, but we were running out of time. The Swedes had an appointment with a diving instructor in Aqaba; I had an office to run in Bahrain. We had a last night out in Damascus and went our separate ways. And that was when I ran into trouble.
Heading to the airport in a taxi the next morning, I found the whole thirty-kilometre-long airport road had been blocked off to traffic. President Assad was going to the airport to greet Sudan’s president, El Bashir. Paranoid about assassination attempts, his guards lined the road at intervals, standing around smoking beneath the trees and turning back civilian cars. ‘Do not worry,’ said my laid-back driver, ‘I know another route. You will catch your plane.’ He weaved his way through a crowded Shi’ite suburb of the capital, where black-turbanned mullahs in Iranian-style cloaks emerged from a blue-tiled mosque with twin minarets. The road became a track that led through the trees fringing the airport road, and sure enough, we emerged back on to the airport road. Almost immediately an angry-looking presidential guard blocked our path. He was very young, perhaps about twenty, almost European-looking and dressed in jeans and T-shirt with a bandolier and a short, paratroopers’ version of the AK-47 assault rifle. He was pointing it right at us. ‘Move back!’ he shouted. But my driver had other ideas. He started to argue with him, speaking in the peculiar Syrian drawl that ends each sentence on an upnote, as if asking a question. ‘Hey, my brother,’ he said, ‘keep calm, we’ll just wait here till the president passes.’ Bad idea. One of the most terrifying sounds in the world has to be that of someone cocking a Kalashnikov machine gun, especially if it is being pointed at you. Tshick tshick. ‘I mean it!’ screamed the guard. His hands were shaking and I could see the whites of his knuckles on the AK’s pistol grip. ‘I’m going to shoot you if you don’t move back!’ The trembling barrel was pointed directly at the windscreen and while his target was the driver I doubted I would escape a burst once he squeezed the trigger. Yet my driver seemed transfixed; he said nothing, did nothing. I heard a cracked voice calling out in Arabic, ‘It’s all right, we’re moving back. Don’t shoot!’ The voice was my own and I gripped the driver by his lapels and shook him. ‘Do what he wants, for God’s sake!’ I screamed at him. Painfully slowly, the driver jiggled the gearstick into reverse, looked over his shoulder and drove backwards down the track. Needless to say, I missed my plane.
Six months later I met Amanda, my future wife. Every year a group of us – both Arabs and expats – held a black-tie ball for three hundred people at my Bahraini villa. The tradition of the Jasra Ball had been started by Mark Bullough in the eighties, when he had used a stepladder to climb up on the roof and leaped long-legged and fully clothed into the pool. It had been held every year since, except 1990 out of respect for Iraqi-occupied Kuwait. There was a jazz band, a DJ, balloons in the swimming pool, waiters, white tablecloths, a hot buffet from the Sheraton, a dance floor on the tiny lawn and a barrel-chested Sikh security guard manning the door. The guest list was eclectic: Bahraini sheikhs and merchants, British bankers, diplomats and lawyers, Indian entrepreneurs, Lebanese advertising executives, the occasional royal from Oman, Kuwait or Saudi. My Bahraini friends would arrive with their Western girlfriends in tiny, shimmering cocktail dresses and we could always rely on the Irish air stewardesses to be the first to hit the dance floor and the last to leave. British expats based across the water in Saudi Arabia would plan their weekend round the ball, and often friends would breeze in on their way from London to Hong Kong. Writing this now, it seems like another world, a lost society from the 1920s, but for most people there, living in Bahrain really was the lotus life.
At my second Jasra Ball I noticed a stunningly pretty blonde, Scandinavian-looking girl in a short black dress, appearing through the throng and then vanishing. She had a magical smile, bright-blue eyes and everything about her spelled fun. ‘Now why
do I never meet anybody like that?’ I complained to a Bahraini friend. ‘Who is she?’
‘I don’t know but I’m going to find out,’ he replied.
The mystery girl was Amanda, a New Zealander living in Bahrain with her parents and working at the Gulf’s largest advertising agency, where someone had invited her along tonight. By the end of the evening my Bahraini friend had secured a date with her, but at my suggestion we agreed to a double dinner. He would bring her and I would bring an Egyptian girl I knew.
So there we sat, in Cicco’s, Bahrain’s most popular Italian restaurant, clustered round a candlelit table, and I felt sure there was an electric current flowing between me and Amanda. I wheeled out my best jokes and more than once she caught my eye. Weeks later, when my Bahraini friend had given up on her, I asked him if he would mind if I asked her out. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘She’ll just say no.’
But Amanda said yes, and the following month we headed off to one of the most romantic hotels in the Middle East, the Al Bustan Palace in Muscat. Built specially for a Gulf summit of monastic rulers, it overlooked a white sand beach, bracketed by jagged, black, volcanic mountains. A small grove of coconut palms shaded a lawn where exotic coloured birds perched amongst the fronds. In the vast hotel atrium an elderly Omani villager squatted on cushions beside the embers of an ever-burning fire. He was the incense man, placing sticky globules of Omani frankincense from Dhofar on to the hot coals, wafting the sweet smoke towards guests and nodding a wordless greeting. As a Gulf resident who had stayed there before, I managed to get us upgraded to a suite on the seventh floor, an ‘Islamic’ room with a sea view. ‘Islamic’ in this case meant the walls were decorated with an exquisite frieze of tiny tiles arranged in a North African mosaic reminiscent of the mosques and madrasas of Fez that I had sketched so studiously for my degree in the 1980s. Our balcony looked out over the Indian Ocean, where a warm breeze blew, a welcome change from Bahrain in winter, which could be surprisingly cold and dank. All in all it was a heady package and a wonderful place to get to know each other.
Blood and Sand Page 14
