Carl Stellweg
Luxury hotels in crisis areas are peculiar places.
They
aren’t places at all. They’re metaphors. They’re hubs of alienation, with their
clientele of businesspeople, aid workers and journalists from all over the
world.
Outside you may be confronted with the blatant ubiquity of third
world-squalor, but inside, there is nothing to disturb you. There is absence of
squalor. There’s luxury and comfort and so on, and that’s, well, comforting.
You are nowhere. You are an astronaut on your own planet. You are in a spaceship, paradoxically anchored to the ground.
You are nowhere. You are an astronaut on your own planet. You are in a spaceship, paradoxically anchored to the ground.
Through bulletproof windows you catch a
glimpse of the place you’ve travelled to, a place that seems terrible in many
respects, a place that has radically nothing to do with you, and in your more
mournful, dispirited moments, after a day of unanswered calls and cancelled
appointments, you fantasise about the spaceship taking off and bringing you
back to a world that you can comprehend and trust.
In fact, these hotels can be the most dangerous places in
town. The Marriott in Islamabad, for instance, was blown up twice. Scores of
people died. I’ve been there several times, it feels strange that I could have
died there too.
The hotel was reconstructed and now has, according to its website, ‘bomb-proof and shock-proof double security walls and pass-through gates’; but if death and destruction wish to get in again, they will.
The hotel was reconstructed and now has, according to its website, ‘bomb-proof and shock-proof double security walls and pass-through gates’; but if death and destruction wish to get in again, they will.
Third world luxury hotels – you will find them in the most
unlikely places, like the Serena Hotel in Quetta (Pakistan, province of
Baluchistan). The dusty town of Quetta
effectively lies in rebel territory. I was not allowed to leave the hotel
compound without military escort. Of course I objected. I thought it would
interfere with my work as a reporter – but as it turned out, it hardly did.
I
sat with a man who claimed to be a nephew of Taliban-leader Mullah Omar. The
man had a pointed, crimson beard. He talked about overthrowing the Pakistani
government of unbelievers. The Pakistani
soldier that was assigned to me for my protection sat next to him, AK-47 in his
lap, and nodded in agreement.
My armed escort gave me a feeling of importance – and of
danger, which, I must say, was rather gratifying. This was all a few weeks
after 9/11, and we journalists thought that history, after having seemingly
ended, had resumed, and that we were going to play an adventurous part in it. I
didn’t think about my own private life. It was exhilarating to think about all
kinds of things, except my own private life.
But look what happened. Look what happened after 9/11. We of
the world that was targeted by those attacks, we of the free world as we call
it ourselves, have stopped thinking about anything else but our own private
lives. We of the free world have cut ourselves off from history. We are all in
private spaceships now, behind bulletproof windows, catching glimpses of places
that seem terrible to us.
And next to us sit our governments, our would-be
protectors, not unlike that Pakistani soldier sat next to Mullah Omar’s nephew,
nodding in eager agreement, nodding with what almost seems to be sardonic
encouragement, at our ever growing fears and delusions.
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