War Hotels

By Kenneth Morrison and Abdallah El Binni

War Hotels is a gripping exploration of hotels in wartime and in other times of crisis, told through the prism of now iconic hotels that were frequented by foreign correspondents, diplomats, aid workers, politicians, paramilitaries and spies in conflicts in Northern Ireland, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Iraq, and Bosnia & Herzegovina. It focuses on hotels that became closely associated with the brutal conflicts in which they were a part, such as the Europa Hotel in Belfast, the Continental and the Caravelle in Saigon, the Commodore in Beirut, and Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn. Building upon the research undertaken for the Al Jazeera documentary series of the same name, this book tells the stories of these hotels in even more fascinating detail, drawing upon in-depth interviews with those who witnessed the tumultuous events that took place within or in the immediate environs of the buildings. By using war hotels as a locus of memory and a lens through which to convey the human stories and the conflicts, they provide not only viable ‘micro-histories’ but a rich vein of historical narratives and moving personal recollections.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Release date: Mar 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781785374043

Kenneth Morrison

Kenneth Morrison is a Professor of History at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK and was the historical consultant for the Al Jazeera series War Hotels.

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WAR HOTELS

Kenneth Morrison is a Professor of Modern History at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. He is the author of Nationalism, Statehood and Identity in Post-Yugoslav Montenegro (2018) and Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn: On the Frontline of Politics and War (2016), and the co-author of The Sandžak: A History (2013) and Reporting the Siege of Sarajevo (2021). Kenneth was the historical consultant for the Al Jazeera documentary series War Hotels (2018–21) and is the co-director of the Hotel History Foundation, which is based in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina.

Abdallah El Binni is a Lebanese filmmaker and investigative journalist based in Doha, Qatar, where he works for Al Jazeera Arabic. He began his career as a journalist in 1988 and has since covered numerous conflicts as a cameraman and photojournalist in countries such as Lebanon, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Iraq and Afghanistan. As a filmmaker, Abdallah has produced numerous award-winning documentaries, among them Prisoner 345 (2006) and The Imam and the Colonel (2012). He was both the executive producer and director of the acclaimed Al Jazeera documentary series War Hotels (2018–21).

WAR HOTELS

KENNETH MORRISON &

ABDALLAH EL BINNI

Book Logo

First published in 2022 by

Merrion Press

10 George’s Street

Newbridge

Co. Kildare

Ireland

www.merrionpress.ie

© Kenneth Morrison and Abdallah El Binni, 2022

978 1 78537 402 9 (Paper)

978 1 78537 404 3 (Ebook)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

Typeset in Sabon LT Std 11.5/17.5 pt

Cover design by: riverdesignbooks.com

Front cover image: Aftermath of Provisional IRA bomb at Europa Hotel, Belfast, N. Ireland, extreme damage, no injuries. Copyright image from Victor Patterson, Belfast, UK.

Merrion Press is a member of Publishing Ireland.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Foreword

Introduction: The War Hotel

1 The Continental and the Caravelle, Saigon, Vietnam

2 The Hôtel Le Royale, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

3 The Europa Hotel, Belfast, Northern Ireland

4 The Holiday Inn and the Commodore, Beirut, Lebanon

5 The Al Rasheed and the Palestine, Baghdad, Iraq

6 The Holiday Inn, Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina

Postscript: The Demise of the War Hotel

Select Bibliography

Index

In memory of Michael Morrison and Nazih El Binni

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THIS BOOK IS THE PRODUCT of years of research stemming from a rewarding collaboration that culminated in the Al Jazeera documentary series entitled War Hotels, the first three episodes of which were broadcast in December 2018, with subsequent episodes, delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, transmitted in May 2021. The relatively limited parameters of the thirty-minute documentary film did not, however, allow the wealth of research material and remarkable stories that we gathered in pre-production research and the interviews we conducted in London, Beirut, Belfast, Baghdad, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Hanoi, Phnom Penh and Sarajevo to be conveyed as fully as we would have liked. We nevertheless continued to gather interview data that could not be used in the series but we knew could potentially be utilised in a book based on it. Throughout, we had the privilege of interviewing not only a plethora of current and former foreign correspondents who had stayed in the hotels that we were focusing on but also the staff and management of them. The material we collected and the personal stories conveyed to us were far too valuable to leave in our archives. Thus, we committed to telling the stories of these remarkable hotels, their staff and their guests in greater depth.

While there has been some excellent academic research generated on the role of hotels in wartime (the most notable being those studies authored by Sara Fregonese, Adam Ramadan, Kevin James and Robert A. Davidson), this book is the first to document the experiences of staff, management and guests in the world’s most iconic war hotels. In order to meet this objective, we had to conduct extensive interviews and the experience, knowledge and willingness of these interviewees to share their stories with us proved absolutely vital to our project. We therefore owe a debt of gratitude to Martin Bell, Gerald Seymour, Peter Arnett, Jim Laurie, John Gardner, Robin Walsh, John McCarthy, Jonathan Dimbleby, Tom Young, Hoang Van Cuong, Sara Fregonese, James McGinn, Martin Mulholland, Roland Neveu, Julie Hastings, Boba Lizdek, Amra Abadžić, Paul Lowe, Henry Kelly, Saleh Rifai, Sami Haddad, Hanan Haddad, Yousef Nazzal, Ramzi Haidar, Ahmed Shebaro, Hajrudin (Hajro) Rovčanin, John Simpson, Jeremy Bowen, Nicolas Tatro, Jon Swain, Tim Llewellyn, Allan Little, Remy Ourdan, John F. Burns, Samia Nakhoul and – not least – to Robert Fisk, Chris Ryder and Samir Korić, who all sadly passed away before the publication of this book. Many of their observations, made in interviews over the years, are included in this book.

Thanks to Giles Trendle, Ingrid Falk and Andrew Whitman at Al Jazeera for their help and support throughout the production of the War Hotels documentary series and the writing of this book. Thank you, too, to all at Merrion Press – particularly Conor Graham, Patrick O’Donoghue, Sarah Doyle and Wendy Logue – for their immeasurable patience and unswerving commitment and for ensuring that the book was brought to completion despite the challenges that we collectively faced during the pandemic. Gratitude, too, to Anne Simpson, who believed in the project from the beginning and has been a constant source of encouragement over many years. Of course, this book could not have been written without the unstinting love, support and endless patience of Norma, Helen, Hannah, Amira, Ghada, Malek and Karim.

Kenneth Morrison & Abdallah El Binni

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ABC American Broadcasting Company

AFP Agence France-Presse

AP Associated Press

ARVN Army of the Republic of Vietnam

BBC British Broadcasting Corporation

CBS Columbia Broadcasting System

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

CNN Cable News Network

CPA Coalition Provisional Authority (Iraq)

CPJ Committee to Protect Journalists

CPNLAF Cambodian People’s National Liberation Forces

EBU European Broadcasting Union

EC European Commu2nity

ECOM European Commission

EOKA National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters

EU European Union

FUNK National United Front of Kampuchea

GRUNK Royal Government of the National Union of Kampuchea

HDZ Croatian Democratic Community

HDZ-BiH Croatian Democratic Community of Bosnia & Herzegovina

ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross

ICTY International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

INM Independent Nasserite Movement (also known as Al-Mourabitoun)

IOC International Olympic Committee

IPC International Press Centre

IRA Irish Republican Army

ISIS Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

ISIS-K Islamic State (Khorasan Province)

ITN Independent Television News

JNA Yugoslav People’s Army

KRF Kataeb Regulatory Forces

LNM Lebanese National Movement

NAM Non-Aligned Movement

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NBC National Broadcasting Company

NICRA Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association

NLF National Liberation Front (of Vietnam)

NVA North Vietnamese Army

OHR Office of the High Representative

OIC Organisation of Islamic Countries

OSCE Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

PLO Palestine Liberation Organization

PTT Postal, Telegraph and Telephone

PUP Protestant Unionist Party

RAF (British) Royal Air Force

RPG Rocket-propelled grenade

RTBiH Radio Television Bosnia & Herzegovina

RUC Royal Ulster Constabulary

SDA Party of Democratic Action (Bosnia & Herzegovina)

SDS Serbian Democratic Party

UDA Ulster Defence Association

UFF Ulster Freedom Fighters

UN United Nations

UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

UNPROFOR United Nations Protection Force

UNRWA United Nations Relief and Works Agency

UNSC United Nations Security Council

UNSCOM United Nations Special Commission

UPI United Press International

USAF United States Air Force

UUP Ulster Unionist Party

UVF Ulster Volunteer Force

VC Viet Cong

VRS Army of Republika Srpska

WMDs Weapons of Mass Destruction

WTN Worldwide Television News

FOREWORD

AN ENJOYABLE PART OF MY role as Managing Director of Al Jazeera English is the chance to talk over story ideas with colleagues. It was during one such conversation, some time in 2018, that my colleague Abdallah El Binni pitched an idea for a documentary series that he had been keen to make ever since first conceiving it while on deployment in Kandahar, Afghanistan, way back in December 2001.

Both Abdallah and I share a deep interest in the history of Lebanon. I had worked as a freelance journalist in Beirut throughout the latter years of the country’s civil war. Abdallah is a Lebanese journalist with a great deal of experience working in the Middle East and a canny appreciation of a good story. Sitting in my office at Al Jazeera HQ in Doha, Abdallah laid out his idea for a TV series on famous hotels that had become caught up in surrounding conflicts. My interest was piqued as soon as he raised his first example: Beirut’s Holiday Inn.

On first arriving in Beirut in 1985, I had always felt grimly enthralled by the gutted, skeletal hulk of the Holiday Inn hotel. It had been a focal point of ruthless fighting in the early years of the Lebanese Civil War. Twenty-six storeys high – with a concrete exterior punctured and pockmarked from countless rockets, bullets and shrapnel – the building still looms large on the Beirut skyline.

But I sense something darker about the structure beyond its size and appearance. For me, the building stands as a brooding testament to the primeval hatred that can lie in the hearts of humankind. It conjures up images of masked snipers skulking within its dark and devastated corridors to ply their deadly trade. It brings to mind disturbing tales of a captured fighter thrown to his death from one of its top floors and of bodies dragged through streets.

I was intrigued as Abdallah ran through the list of other hotels he proposed to feature in the series. Some I had stayed in myself during journalistic assignments over the years: Beirut’s Commodore Hotel (refurbished after its desolation); Baghdad’s Al Rasheed Hotel (with its unforgettable floor mural at the lobby entrance); and the Palestine Hotel, also in Baghdad (struck at different times by US forces and Iraqi insurgents). Abdallah also mentioned hotels in Northern Ireland, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Many of us will have visited or stayed in hotels – whether for business, leisure or stopover. With the constant comings and goings of guests over the years, they are places that can hold countless memories and stories. No surprise, either, that hotels and motels have been the settings for some memorable movies. Hotels can be prisms through which to observe a colourful spectrum of characters, circumstances and scenarios. They can hold narratives to offer insight into larger events.

I felt Abdallah’s concept of the hotel as a narrative device was original and creative, offering fresh perspective and greater context on important past events that had enduring storylines. This approach fitted well with the editorial ethos of Al Jazeera, and so I agreed to commission the series.

With a budget to develop the idea, Abdallah set to work. His research led him – inevitably and serendipitously – to Kenneth Morrison, a Professor of History at De Montfort University in Leicester in the UK, who had published Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn: On the Frontline of Politics and War in 2016. While the prime focus of Kenneth’s book was the hotel in the Bosnian capital, he had laid out in an introductory chapter the reasons why hotels often became strategic assets, prestige targets and sanctuaries as well as bases serving the media in times of conflict.

Without knowing of each other, two people in their own separate worlds – one a journalist, the other an academic – had both developed a fervent interest in the same idea of telling the story of the War Hotel. And when they eventually met it was, by both accounts, a perfect meeting of minds. Kenneth was to become an important interviewee and contributor to the documentary series.

Driven by each other’s interest in the topic, both Abdallah and Kenneth realised that the scope of their research and the amount of material filmed was more than could be contained in TV episodes fixed to a twenty-five-minute duration. Too much had to be left on the cutting-room floor. They felt duty-bound to publish more of the detail and depth behind each story, behind each hotel. This book is the result of the TV series, but also of the need to give an expanded platform to the full gamut of material collected.

It is clear to me that this project has been a labour of love for both authors, providing an engaging chronicle of important events from a novel and unique perspective.

Giles Trendle

Managing Director, Al Jazeera English

Doha, Qatar

September 2021

INTRODUCTION

THE WAR HOTEL

HOTELS ARE AS ORDINARY AS they are omnipresent. Budget, mid-range or luxurious, they are part of our everyday lives whether we use them for business, pleasure or merely convenience. Ordinarily associated with leisure or business – holidays, weekend retreats, conferences, dinners, weddings and parties – the vast majority of guests visit them to enjoy the myriad services, conveniences, luxuries and escapism that only hotels can provide. We may rarely, if at all, consider the important role that hotels play in times of crisis, or that these buildings are adaptable even in the most extreme of circumstances. We may also not think of them as part of a state’s security apparatus, with high levels of surveillance of its guests, or places of intrigue frequented by politicians, diplomats, spies, journalists and representatives of military or paramilitary groups. Moreover, we may not consider that they are occasionally commandeered by military or paramilitary forces as bases, headquarters, field hospitals or special courts, and that they can also be redeployed as prisons or holding facilities (the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton being the most high-profile ‘five-star prison’, where Saudi elites accused of corruption were held in November 2017). Yet hotels are highly adaptable spaces that can be effectively and efficiently repurposed when social, political or security conditions require.

The fact that hotels can be repurposed so effectively was evidenced throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, during which hoteliers were forced to adapt to an unsettling new reality and, similarly, adapt their spaces for purposes for which they had not been built. As the pandemic tightened its grip, the global hospitality industry began rapidly to stall – and by March 2020, as the virus spread inexorably throughout Europe and the Americas, the industry went into free fall. Occupancy rates plummeted and events, such as business conferences and weddings, were cancelled. Normal guests stayed away, either because they were reluctant to travel or were unable to do so as a consequence of travel restrictions. In a scenario unthinkable just months before, hotel owners and management were forced to close or to find creative ways of ‘repurposing’ their facilities, and the hospitality industry responded in a number of ways – adapting hotels into quarantine centres and field hospitals or as accommodation for medical staff, key workers and the vulnerable or homeless. No longer places for leisure, business, enjoyment and indulgence, they had become instead vital components in the broader infrastructure of pandemic crisis management.

Of course, there is nothing particularly novel about the repurposing of hotels, and they have long played a key role in mitigating crises or providing a semblance of sanctuary for those fleeing conflicts or natural disasters. Indeed, the recent conflicts in Libya and Syria, which generated an exodus of refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea, demonstrated just how important hotels are in providing crucial support for those seeking refuge. Hotels on the Greek coast and islands (such as the Captain Elias Hotel in Kos), as well as numerous examples in the Balkans, were transformed into large centres for refugees run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and funded by the European Commission (ECOM) as part of a wider European Union (EU) relocation scheme. This model was adopted across Europe, the United States and Canada in advance of refugees being more permanently resettled. Larger hotel chains negotiated contracts with national governments to help them deal with the influx of refugees, not only ensuring that the refugees could be safely housed but also, for the hotel chains, guaranteeing occupancy rates above the industry average. And what was established in 2015 has continued. Hotels were also rented by the UK government to house Afghan refugees in the wake of the chaotic departure of US and NATO forces from Afghanistan in August 2021.

Hotels have long served as temporary sanctuaries for refugees fleeing conflict within countries suffering war. Most are, after all, solidly built structures which possess an internal infrastructure that includes generators; water tanks; refrigeration; stores of dried food; and, crucially, cellars, conference rooms and function halls where large numbers can be accommodated. During the war in Croatia in 1991, for example, the basements of numerous hotels on the Dalmatian coast, such as the Hotel Libertas, were used as shelters for civilians fleeing the shelling of Dubrovnik and its environs. Likewise, the Hotel Europa in Sarajevo was used to house refugees before the Bosnian Serb Army used incendiary shells to destroy it in August 1992. In the same year, the Iveria Hotel in Tbilisi, Georgia, was repurposed as a refugee centre for those who had escaped the fighting in Abkhazia. But the role of the ‘hotel as sanctuary’ was most clearly demonstrated by the case of the Hôtel des Milles Collines in Kigali during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Hitherto one of the city’s most prestigious hotels, it became a place of temporary sanctuary – its manager, Paul Rusesabagina (whose endeavours were dramatised in the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda), sheltering over a thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus from the murderous Hutu Interahamwe paramilitaries.

In times of war and crisis, hotels have been used as places for negotiations between warring factions; as military barracks, as many were in South Vietnam, where numerous hotels in Saigon became billets for US military personnel; and even as prisons or rape camps (the Hotel Vilina Vlas near Višegrad in Bosnia & Herzegovina became notorious as one such place in 1992). But, depending on their location and elevation, they can also be highly valued strategic locations that are fought over by rival armed groups. Indeed, in the context of urban warfare, hotels can become vital strategic assets that allow for the control of the high ground. Armies or militias thus engage in fierce battles over them and other tall buildings to ensure that they can establish control of the strategic heights, from where they can dictate terms. The Holiday Inn in Beirut, which was central to the ‘Battle of the Hotels’ in 1975–76, was a case in point, because control of it provided an important strategic advantage to whichever militia occupied that elevated position.

Even in countries ostensibly at peace, hotels are not immune from violence. They can represent ‘prestige targets’ for terrorist groups, the bombing of which is likely to generate significant publicity and cause casualties among those they consider their enemies. Frequently, the targets are not the hotels per se but the guests, deemed to represent an occupying force or people. Take, for example, the July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which had been essentially requisitioned by the British Mandate authorities in Palestine. The attack by the Zionist paramilitary organisation Irgun was, in their view, legitimate because they regarded the hotel as the base of an occupying force. Similarly, the bombing of the Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem by the Jewish paramilitary organisation Haganah in January 1948 was an explicit attempt to kill members of Arab armed groups whom they believed were plotting against them. In Cyprus, too, a British delegation was targeted by the Greek-Cypriot National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA) at the Ledra Palace Hotel in Nicosia in November 1955, during the annual Caledonian Society Ball. Throughout ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, the Europa Hotel in Belfast was bombed over thirty times by the Provisional IRA, not only because attacking it would generate publicity but also as part of an attempt to make Northern Ireland ungovernable. The IRA’s targeting of the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Conservative Party Conference in October 1984 was a direct attack on the British government.

Of course, one would expect that hotels used as bases for political leaders or representatives of occupying forces would be heavily securitised, but other hotels, particularly those that host guests working for international organisations, are considered both ‘soft targets’ and fair game. The attacks on the Serena in Kabul in January 2008, the Pearl Continental Hotel in Peshawar in June 2009, the Intercontinental in Kabul in June 2011 and at the same hotel in January 2018 were carried out because of the presence of foreign guests and what, to the terrorist groups, they represented. The first attack on the Intercontinental, during which a group of nine armed suicide bombers besieged