PEACE ON EARTH WITH ANY LUCK
John Simpson regrets that he must
spend another Christmas in a foreign hotel
Baghdad THE CHRISTMAS decorations were what you might expect in a Bucharest hotel at the end of the Ceausescu years: tacky and careless. Christmas itself had passed in a blur of sudden violence, tiredness and bitter cold. Now it was New Year's Eve, and I was dining in the Bucharest Intercon- tinental with a group that had gathered by chance rather than intention. We were supposedly the guests of an American television network, though our hosts soon forgot us: later, an angry waiter cornered me as I was on my way to bed and made me pay the entire bill. But for the moment all was ersatz jollity, and even here in Ruma- nia, the band was starting to move into Auld Lang Syne. Obediently I raised my glass of Bulgarian champagne and made the necessary facial gestures. Next year, I told myself, I will spend Christmas a very long way from here: somewhere warm, different and non-Christian.
And so it came to pass: though Baghdad at a time of international crisis wasn't quite what I had in mind, I haven't even been able to get away from that dreadful corpo- rate yuletide, phoney as plastic mistletoe, which pervades every big modern hotel wherever you go in December. In Amman, on my way back to Iraq, the hotel lobby was dominated by a Hansel-and-Gretel house, eight feet high, made entirely of real ginger bread fixed with industrial staples and roofed with some frightful icing. It was big enough, and contained enough nutrition to have sheltered and fed one of the Bangladeshi families from the refugee camp whom you see on the road to Amman airport, fetching water from a stand-pipe in the mud and living in dirty, flapping tents.
`Jordan's done plenty for those bas- tards,' I heard an Arab voice behind me say on the flight from London. A gold crucifix round his neck declared him to be, I thought, a Palestinian Christian: 'Have yourself a merry Christmas,' he instructed his neighbour as we undid our seatbelts and stood up.
Surely, I thought, as Iraqi Airways landed me next day in Baghdad, I shall be free of his kind of Christmas now. But directly I set foot in the Al Rasheed hotel I knew I was wrong. Solemn-faced Somali porters were setting up step-ladders among the groups of plump Kuwaitis who fill the hotel lobby at present, and stringing up silver and green decorations.
Somehow the idea has got around in the West that Iraq is Muslim fundamentalist. It's true that the President has appealed to Islam a great deal in the present crisis. He presents himself as the true protector of the Holy Places while the Saudi govern- ment pollutes them by allowing American soldiers into the country. But it is done a little in the spirit of Joseph Stalin's appeal to the Orthodox Church after the Nazi invasion of 1941: it is religion as a unifying social force. Fundamentalism has been fiercely stamped on here, and by compari- son with Iran, say, this is not a religious country; I don't suppose the Esteqlal hotel in Teheran, the nearest equivalent to the Al Rasheed, is putting up Christmas de- corations this year. Perhaps I should have gone there.
But then more than 90 per cent of Iran's population adheres to Shi'a Islam, and 80 per cent are Farsi-speaking Persians. Iraq has no such homogeneity. A typical Iraqi could be a Kurd or an Arab, a Suni or a Shi'ite, a Catholic or an Assyrian. Most of the women who work behind the desks in the main Baghdad hotels are Christian. `We work harder and speak better En- glish,' one of them said to me aggressively. `And we're more beautiful,' said her friend, sending both of them into fits of laughter. The diversity of Iraq is such that no one, not even Saddam Hussein (himself a Shi'ite, though his foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, was born a Christian) could impose uniformity of belief on this country.
And so Iraqis are free to drink the beer and arak which their own country openly produces, as well as the Scotch which people say comes in large quantities from the bonded warehouses of Islamic Kuwait. The Ministry of Religious Affairs has built and restored churches and even synago- gues, as well as mosques. No one stops men gambling and no one makes women wear the veil. Iraqis are not as free nor as outspoken, in my experience, as Iranians. They have to be very careful what they say about the government; but they are not forced into religious conformity.
Christmas, therefore, promises to be a reasonably eclectic experience, and Har- rod's has been generous enough to send a sizeable hamper to see my colleagues and me through it; though what we, in our turn, are likely to see is uncertain. Before I came back to Baghdad it seemed clear enough: George Bush had decided against open warfare, and the framework existed for a deal by which Iraqi troops would pull out of enough of Kuwait to satisfy just about everyone. But I had forgotten Sad- dam Hussein's impulsion to win every contest. Now he believes he has the United States on the run.
Ordinary people here are distinctly ner- vous about the daily instructions on civil defence, and the evacuation drills in big buildings. But government officials regard Bush's decision to talk to Iraq as the beginning of the break up of the anti- Saddam coalition. 'Soon,' said one, 'there will be nothing left except sanctions, and everyone except the Americans will be trying to break them.' But instead of getting out while he's ahead, Saddam Hussein is apparently determined to stay at the tables. His people are now talking of ignoring the United Nations deadline of 15 January and (as Saddam proposed on 12 August) withdrawing from Kuwait only when the Israelis withdraw from the Occu- pied Territories. It is, as ever, impossible to gauge whether this is primarily a ploy to demonstrate Saddam's toughness, or whether he means it.
At least now we can concentrate on the politics, and not bother about the British hostages. Almost all of them have gone: those who whined about the failure of the `Thatcher Government' or the British Embassy to look after them, together with the ones who didn't whine, who stayed under cover till the end or kept up every- one's spirits with their own good humour. In the British Club those who were left gathered round the bar: stout men in their fifties, holding the hymn-sheets out in front of their stomachs; young men in T-shirts, grinning through the familiar verses. In a few days most of them will be gone too. The hostages used to look wistfully at the journalists, knowing we could leave Iraq and they couldn't. This Christmas they'll be at home watching television, and we'll be here watching the crisis.
John Simpson is foreign affairs editor of the BBC.
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