BAGHDAD: Surly clerks, grimy towels, painfully slow elevators and missing room keys are trying the patience of guests at Baghdad’s famed Al Rasheed Hotel.
The hotel became a landmark during the 1991 Gulf War as millions of television viewers watched footage of the US-led bombardment of Baghdad shot from its rooftop and windows.
The Al Rasheed has a new role to play in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq — housing hundreds of members of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) ruling Iraq and military personnel.
“It is similar to a college campus. We all complain about the cafeteria food together, run for the bus together and then we all see each other on campus at the CPA compound,” said a US official as she sipped freshly squeezed orange juice at a bar off the lobby.
Guests in the grey, 18-floor block complain about the grumpy clerks, shabby furniture and slow lifts, the same irritants that used to grate on its clientele during the Saddam era.
“Most days they change the towel in my room, so I’m luckier than the soldiers who were staying here. I brought my own sheets,” said the US official, whose room overlooks the hotel’s lush gardens and swimming pool, which is now empty.
The official never got to see one of the more remarkable features that once graced the five-star establishment built by Saddam to accommodate presidents and kings invited to a summit of non-aligned nations in the early 1980s.
When George Bush Senior led an international coalition in 1991 to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, Iraqis embedded a tile portrait of the US president at the hotel’s entrance and emblazoned it with a caption that declared “Bush is Criminal”.
In a gesture seen as insulting in the Middle East, visitors had to step on Bush’s face as it glared up with bared teeth.
The portrait is now gone, gouged out and replaced with plain grey marble by US-led troops and contractors who renovated the hotel for the provisional authority’s burgeoning ranks.
A SINISTER PAST: In the Saddam era dozens of unidentified men thronged the Al Rasheed’s lobby. All belonged to the country’s feared Mukhabarat internal intelligence service.
The stories recounted by journalists are legendary. One told how, shortly after asking guests whether they needed ice for their drinks, a waiter bearing an ice bucket knocked at the door. Fast work considering he had not yet called room service.
The men in the lobby and the Information Ministry minders who accompanied reporters and recorded all their interviews are now gone.
But recently a waiter approached a journalist in the lobby and asked quietly if he could talk.
“I have worked here for so many years and I want to say that nothing has changed,” the waiter said.
“Some of the same people still run things here, they still watch us, they still push us around,” he said, before walking off quickly at the approach of one of his colleagues.
Although the front desk is still manned by surly Iraqi receptionists, a US reservations manager strictly controls room allocation.
In the Saddam era, accommodation could be had only after payment of a bribe. The amount ranged from $20 to $100, depending on how badly you needed a room.
A returned Iraqi exile now advising the CPA said he could not imagine paying even $5 to get into a room.—Reuters