Is Anything Happening? Page 8

  The police ranks parted as they reached the spot where we were cowering, swept past us and continued on their way, leaving us untouched. Such was the power of those magisterial words inscribed on the inside of our passports’ front cover: ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty…’ Or perhaps the police simply did not notice us.

  Some years later, while I was based in Italy, I had to return to the UK for medical treatment, having contracted a nasty case of hepatitis A. I was severely jaundiced, so to disguise the fact that the whites of my eyes were a deeply unpleasant shade of yellow, I was wearing sunglasses as I made my way through immigration at Heathrow.

  I had also grown a beard while languishing in my sick bed, so the photograph in my passport could no longer be described as anything resembling an accurate likeness. The immigration officer took one look at it, then at me, and then at the photo again. ‘I’m very sorry, sir,’ he said, ‘but I shall have to ask you to remove either the beard or the sunglasses.’ In the circumstances, I felt I was getting off lightly.

  When I was based in the Middle East, I was the proud possessor of no fewer than three UK passports: one for Israeli stamps, one for Arab ones (most Arab countries will not let you in if you have an Israeli stamp in your passport), and a third that was kept in a desk drawer in the office in London for whenever a visa needed to be applied for in a hurry.

  Sometimes, out of a spirit of sheer devilment, I would present my Arab-stamped passport to Israeli immigration officials at Ben Gurion airport and, explaining that I was a journalist, ask them very kindly not to stamp it. A red paper marker would be inserted into the passport instead of a stamp and as I made my way through to the baggage area, I would be pulled to one side to answer ‘just a few questions’.

  Usually, it was little more than routine, but one official was so curious about the bewildering variety of Arab visa stamps that she went through them, page by page, asking me to identify each of them in turn. ‘That one is Saudi Arabia,’ I told her. ‘That one is Syria, that one is Libya.’ There were several others as well and, at the end of the process, she handed my passport back. ‘I see,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘You seem to have visited all our friends.’ I rather admired her sangfroid.

  I admit to having a soft spot for all the visa and entry stamps in my passports – they seem to hark back to an era when travel was much more exotic than it is now. If I could, and if I was not convinced that to do so would make me look like an utter prat, I would gladly plaster destination stickers all over my luggage, just as transatlantic steamship passengers did a hundred years ago.

  There have been times, though, when I would gladly have swapped my UK passports, with all their echoes of Britain’s imperialist past, for a passport from a less – how should I put this? – history-laden nation. Especially in the Middle East, the UK is often blamed for the region’s current troubles, having played a less than glorious role in its recent past, and I have often hankered after a Swedish or an Irish passport. No one hates the Swedes or the Irish.

  But even a passport from the most blameless of nations – Luxembourg, perhaps? – would offer no protection against the health-endangering frustrations of airport officialdom. I have never understood the sense of the maxim ‘To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.’ It plainly dates back to long before the days of modern air travel and the hell that is an airport departure lounge.

  Rio de Janeiro, checking in for an overnight flight back to London. Lee Chaundy, a BBC sound engineer with whom I frequently travelled to far-flung places, has a lightweight collapsible camera tripod strapped to the outside of his backpack. (The introduction of multi-skilling at the BBC meant that many sound engineers were also trained as photographer-videographers so that they could carry twice as much kit and work twice as hard.) At the security scanner, an official tells him that he will not be allowed to take the tripod on board and will have to return to the check-in desk to have it tagged and put in the hold.

  We try to reason with him but, in true jobsworth fashion, he will not be moved. ‘Here,’ says Lee, as he unstraps the tripod and thrusts it into the official’s hands. ‘You can have it.’ The official walks across to a refuse container and ceremoniously disposes of the tripod. We are not amused.

  At some point during the flight, as we are trying without much success to get some sleep (yes, we are flying economy), a member of the BA cabin crew comes down the aisle with a message. The tripod has been retrieved from the airport refuse bin and is in the hold. We will find it on the carousel at Heathrow.

  We never discovered exactly how they did it, but I can only imagine that a BA crew member had observed our altercation at security and somehow managed to retrieve the confiscated tripod. Just as had been the case at Schiphol, I was left marvelling at how, just occasionally, officials go out of their way to be helpful.

  In 1997, my long-suffering producer colleague Craig Swan and I were dispatched to report on a massive flooding disaster in southern Somalia. The country had already plunged into anarchy following a coup that had dislodged its President Mohamed Siad Barre six years earlier, after more than twenty years in power. There was no central authority and only piecemeal relief efforts to help the hundreds of thousands of people who had had to flee from their homes.

  Craig and I flew first to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, and then to Garissa, in eastern Kenya, about 125 miles from the Somali border. (In April 2015, gunmen from the Somali al-Shabaab group attacked Garissa University College, killed 150 people and took 700 students hostage.) We were reliant on aid flights to get us into Somalia, often travelling there and back on the same day because the relief agencies (or, more likely, their insurers) were not keen to risk having their aircraft parked in Somalia overnight.

  On one occasion we hitched a ride on a giant Soviet-made helicopter, piloted by Bulgarians who spoke no English. The chopper was elderly, as were the pilots, but they got us as far as Kismayo, the lawless port city which had become a frequent battleground during Somalia’s endless civil war. As Craig and I walked with some trepidation from the runway towards the airport exit, having no idea what to expect, a man approached us with hand outstretched.

  ‘Are you gentlemen from the BBC?’ We admitted that we were. ‘That is wonderful. I am the stringer here for the BBC Somali service. Can I offer you a lift into town?’ We were so pleased to meet a colleague in such a godforsaken place that it occurred to neither of us to ask him for any form of identification. Instead, we clambered eagerly into his Land Rover, grateful to have found a friendly face.

  Just as we were setting off, however, four more men climbed on board, and each one of them was carrying a Kalashnikov automatic weapon. Craig and I exchanged glances but said nothing. I noticed Craig discreetly switching on his mini-disc recorder as we bumped our way along a mud track into Kismayo. Just in case.

  A man sitting behind me poked me between the shoulder blades with the barrel of his gun. ‘Me, immigration officer,’ he said with a big grin. ‘Visa, hundred dollars.’ I told him I would buy his visa when we reached our destination, but when we got there, I managed to lose him and no money changed hands. As far as I know, the man whom we met at the airport was indeed the local BBC stringer, and the gunmen were probably his security detail. But we never saw them again so we were never able to find out for sure.

  Arriving in dodgy airports in dodgy countries is one thing; leaving them should be a lot easier, but sometimes can be even more stressful. Arriving in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 2013 was not as bad as it might have been – only one small ‘fine’ was demanded for some entirely fictitious documentation infraction – leaving, on the other hand, was much more traumatic.

  To be fair, the airport’s computerised baggage-tagging system had collapsed, something that would put even the best-run airport under strain. (And no one would describe Kinshasa as one of the world’s best-run airports, even if it has apparently improved somewhat sinc
e I was there.) The check-in staff were refusing to check anyone in, which inevitably caused vast overcrowding and a significant losing of tempers in the departure hall.

  Then, under dangerously mounting pressure from mutinous passengers, the harassed staff started to issue handwritten baggage tags – I watched my bag disappear onto a mountainous pile and silently bid it a fond farewell, expecting never to see it again. Seat allocations were also done by hand, with the inevitable result that when my colleague and I finally managed to force our way through security and onto the plane, there were already passengers firmly installed in the seats that theoretically had been allocated to us.

  Yet again, officialdom came to the rescue. (Brussels Airlines, take a bow.) A cabin steward took our scribbled boarding passes, told us to wait by the doorway and disappeared towards the front of the plane. Moments later, he beckoned us towards the expensive seats in business class, sat us down and brought us two glasses of something cold, alcoholic and bubbly. And in case you are thinking that we were offered preferential treatment because of the colour of our skins, I am happy to be able to reassure you that two Congolese passengers who were in similar difficulty were also found seats up front.

  Postscript: after the overnight flight to Brussels – unexpectedly comfortable on our business class flat beds – and a quick transfer onto a flight to London, my bag was the first one onto the carousel at Heathrow. Who needs computerised baggage labelling?

  There is one airport about which I have more memories, both good and bad, than any other, even though it is now nearly thirty years since I was last there. To land at Beirut airport in the 1980s was to enter a world in which it was always impossible to anticipate what would happen next. The road from the airport into the city was, for a time, one of the most dangerous stretches of road in the world, passing through Beirut’s feared southern suburbs where Shia militias, including an early incarnation of Hizbollah, held sway.

  In April 1986, the British TV journalist John McCarthy was kidnapped on the airport road, on the same day as the bodies of three other hostages, teachers at the American University of Beirut, were found dumped in the street. Each of them had been shot in the back of the head, apparently in retaliation for US bombing raids on Libya two days earlier.*

  Travelling to the airport was just as dangerous as travelling from it. Once, waiting to board a flight to Cyprus after having spent a week in Beirut, I was frightened out of my life to hear my name being called on the terminal’s PA system. ‘Would Mr Robin Lustig please report to security?’ Convinced that I would find a gang of kidnappers waiting to grab me, I asked a friendly-looking airline pilot to accompany me.

  At the security gate, there was indeed someone waiting for me, but it was a journalist colleague, Chris Drake, then working for the US network NBC, who had a small package that he wanted me to take to Cyprus. He was – of course – duly apologetic when he realised how he had terrified me.

  On another occasion, again waiting for a flight to take me to safety, I witnessed what may well have been the only occasion in aviation history when a plane was hijacked while still on the ground. I was idly staring out of the terminal window when I saw the emergency escape chutes suddenly deploy from a plane waiting to take off. Moments later, passengers started sliding down the chutes and running in panic towards the terminal.

  As if that were not surreal enough, the plane’s engines then fired up and it started to taxi towards the end of the runway. To my utter astonishment, it took off, with all its doors open and emergency chutes flapping. Lebanese security forces shot at it as it gained height, which was perhaps not, I thought, the best way to deal with the crisis.

  Naturally, I made it my business to find some of the passengers who had managed to escape and get their story. But, before long, word spread that the plane had been denied landing permission in Cyprus – it is only a 45-minute flight to Larnaca – and was heading back to Beirut. Sure enough, it soon reappeared, doors still open and emergency chutes still flapping. It landed safely, and taxied to the far end of the runway, at which point the solitary hijacker vanished. It turned out that he was a Lebanese immigration officer whose demands included a promotion, a pay rise and warmer winter coats for himself and his colleagues.

  One passenger died of a heart attack during the hijack but otherwise no one was the worse for their experience. I had a cracking exclusive story for the next day’s paper (this was when I was working for The Observer) and managed to persuade an official to allow me to use one of the few phones in the airport that had an international connection. I dictated my scoop off the top of my head, full of colour and drama, got on the next plane to Cyprus and headed back to my base in Jerusalem.

  The story made one paragraph in the News in Brief column.

  At least airport traumas usually last no more than an hour or two. Hotel traumas are a different matter, and all travelling reporters have plenty of horror stories to swap over a beer or three at the end of another frustrating day. In the days before mobile phones, an efficient hotel switchboard, with helpful operators who knew how to place long-distance calls and take messages, was even more important than hot water in the shower and a functioning toilet. (A useful piece of advice from yesteryear: when checking out of a hotel and distributing tips to the staff – reception desk, housekeeping, bellboy – never forget to tip the switchboard operators.)

  At the height of the Lebanese civil war, the Commodore Hotel in Beirut was the only place to be. It would never have won prizes for architectural distinctiveness or even for cleanliness, but it knew exactly what journalists needed: a bar that stayed open for as long as there were customers, a telex machine that worked, and a manager who knew enough of the right people (and paid them) to keep his hotel out of trouble.

  Its luck finally ran out in early 1987, when it was captured by Druze militiamen and comprehensively trashed. In an article lamenting its demise, I wrote:

  There was always a palpable air of unreality about the Commodore. You could sit in the ground-floor coffee shop, as I once did, calmly eating breakfast, while outside the plate glass windows a nonchalant militiaman equally calmly erected a machine-gun position. Or you could be dictating a dispatch from one of the tiny telephone booths in the lobby and have to break off suddenly when a deafening explosion set the whole edifice rocking on its foundations. ‘Sorry,’ you would say to your head office. ‘That one was a bit close.’14

  Checking in at the Commodore at the height of the civil war invariably involved a black comedy routine at the front desk. ‘Would you prefer a room pool-side or street-side?’ you would be asked. You knew – and the check-in clerk knew that you knew – that pool-side meant being more exposed to shell fire from the mountains to the east of the city, whereas street-side meant being at greater risk from car bombs. There was no right answer, and no scientific risk analysis – it was simply down to superstition. So I always went for street-side. Don’t ask me why.

  Even thirty years later, I remember the dapper hotel manager, Fuad Saleh, always immaculately turned out in a light-grey suit; and Georgette in the coffee shop, always ready with fresh orange juice and strong coffee, until she changed into a bright turquoise silk blouse for the evening shift in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant.

  And then there was Eddy, in his little bookshop in the lobby, where he sold the customised cigarette lighters that became an essential item of equipment for any self-respecting Middle East correspondent, and who, when he learned that I was working for The Observer, smiled warmly and said: ‘Ah, The Observer. I well remember one of your predecessors, Mr Kim Philby. A wonderful man.’

  The least popular resident at the Commodore – and when I say least popular, I mean least popular by a very long way – was the grey parrot that lived in a cage at one end of the dimly lit circular bar, and whose favourite party trick was to imitate the long, slowly descending whistle of an incoming shell. Late at night, we would amuse ourselves by dreaming up a variety of increasingly grisly ends for the wretched bird.<
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  There was also the Commodore cat, Tommy, rather larger than was good for his health, who liked to warm his tum by snoozing for hours on end on top of the Reuters and Associated Press tape machines in the lobby. At least he never whistled.

  You could not find a hotel more different from the Commodore than Mrs Bhandari’s guesthouse in Amritsar, northern India. Mrs Bhandari was one of those characters whom reporters dream about: full of stories and knowledge, with an opinion about everything, and fabulously rude about nearly everyone.

  She was already in her late seventies when I met her, a proud Parsi in a city that, as the site of the Golden Temple, is at the centre of Sikhism. The Parsis are a Zoroastrian community who originated in Persia but migrated to northern India between the eighth and tenth centuries to escape persecution by Muslim invaders. Mrs Bhandari therefore regarded herself as far superior to the Indians among whom she lived, and she made little secret of it.

  When I arrived at her modest guesthouse in April 1984, I was not feeling my best. A couple of days’ stay at a five-star hotel in Delhi had left me with a severe bout of food poisoning; Mrs Bhandari took one look at me, ordered me to bed and prescribed a bowl of home-made chicken soup. It was just like going home to Mum.

  I discovered later that Mrs Bhandari had a colourful past. Born in 1906, she still remembered the infamous Amritsar massacre of 1919, when British troops under the command of Colonel Reginald Dyer opened fire on Indians who had gathered for a religious festival. According to the British, 379 people were killed and more than 1,000 wounded. Indian sources insisted that more than 1,000 people had died.