“Afghans are dreaming of a normal life, the change will come from within” – Lyse Doucet at the Chiswick Book Festival

Lyse Doucet talking to Julian Worricker in St Michael & All Angels Church for the Chiswick Book festival; Photograph Roger Green

Lyse Doucet talks to Julian Worricker about her ‘People’s History’ of Afghanistan at the Chiswick Book Festival

Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, was at the Chiswick Book Festival on Saturday (13 September) talking about her book The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan. The Chiswick Calendar was the Diamond Sponsor for the event, which quickly sold out.

There is a particular fascination with journalists who are prepared to put their lives on the line to report the truth from war zones, and the respect and admiration for her work was evident from the audience, who received her with great warmth.

She in turn was utterly charming. It is a hallmark of her work that she is able to convey complicated political situations in far flung places by talking to ordinary people and finding out how their lives are affected.

Lyse Doucet and Julian Worricker

She is the ultimate people person, so when Julian Worricker introduced her, instead of launching into “as I say in my book …” she relayed fond memories of when he had visited the hotel that is the focus of her book, reporting on the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban following the 9/11 attacks.

She said how much she enjoyed listening to his BBC World Service show on a Sunday morning and told the audience he was celebrating 40 years in journalism this year.

In typical fashion her book is a ‘People’s History’. She has chosen to write about Afghanistan through the characters of the people who work in the Inter-Continental hotel Kabul, which opened in 1969.

Jim Cox, a member of the congregation who is well-known to many who attend events at St Michael & All Angels Church for the Bedford Park Festival and the book festival, presented her with a copy of a newspaper article about the hotel from when he was there in 1971, following the hippy trail.

Jim Cox with Lyse; and chilling in Kabul in 1971

It’s all about getting the visa

Lyse first stayed in the hotel on Christmas Day 1988. She had been trying to break into reporting and had managed to carve out a niche for herself in Pakistan.

“I just had this feeling that I wanted to go to this part of the world”.

When a staff job came up at the BBC it went to someone more senior, a man who told her she had to go and find somewhere else to report as his girlfriend would be coming out and there would be no room for her to report from there as well.

At the time the BBC were not able to get visas for Afghanistan, whereas she by now had made contacts in the region and was able to get one. Afghanistan at the time was under the control of the Soviet Union, but the signs were there that the Russians would not last much longer, so she thought it would be a good place to go if she was ever to get on the air.

The hotel was “dark and cold” when she arrived and when the receptionist asked her how long she would be staying she had no idea whether to say a few days or a fortnight. She ended up staying there for a year on her first visit.

Lyse and Julian with the audience at St Michael & All Angels Church

“Hospitality is hard wired, it is part of their culture”

Afghanistan is fruitful territory for a war correspondent. Always undergoing change, usually violently and involving the international powers, over 50 years it has seen Soviet backed communism, warlordism, Islamism, western backed democracy and now Islamism again, but Kabul had been known as the Paris of the Middle East.

“By the time you got there for the first time, you were warned that if you went there was a fair chance you might not survive” Julian put it to her.

“Places are like people”, she said. “You decide very quickly if you like them. I was very taken with the character of the country. Hospitality is hard wired, it is part of their culture, and it is stunningly beautiful.

The hotel is on a hill on the western edge of the city, an excellent viewpoint from which to observe the city. She learned from the staff much later, after 9/11, that Osama Bin Laden used to stay there.

He would turn up in a cavalcade of cars with tinted windows, accompanied by Arabs, let himself into the back of the hotel with his own key, and make his way to a suite at the end of a corridor where he was not served by the hotel staff but by his own people. After 9/11 he was not seen there again.

“Warlords used to get stuck in the revolving doors with their guns”

The hotel began as a luxury hotel and warlords would come in from the countryside having never experienced porcelain toilets and bathrooms, or lifts.

“They’d get stuck in the revolving doors with their guns, having never seen one before”, Lyse told the festival audience.

Even rich Afghans would eat on the floor with their hands, on a carpet, causing some confusion to the waiters used to serving international tourists. The new leaders of the country had not previously encountered a buffet on a table with a white cloth on it..

“There were only two phone lines at the hotel. I had to explain to the receptionist that a telephone was more important than a marriage for a journalist”.

For some reason her calls would be routed through the Glasgow telephone exchange, and she developed the routine of receiving a daily call from them at 4pm. On one of these calls she persuaded Nick Danziger to bring her some tights, as the evenings were getting colder, in exchange for her help with a visa.

The name of Lyse Doucet opens doors in Afghanistan, even if they do think she’s a man

This was the period in which I worked with Lyse, producing a programme called HARDtalk for BBC World TV, when Hamid Karzai was president, who Lyse interviewed many times.

“Democracy was in the air. There was excitement. The place was just buzzing. It became a place of hope and optimism”, she said.

She became so well-known in Afghanistan that her name would open doors, and checkpoints, for BBC colleagues.

“The Afghans listened to the BBC’s Pashtun service, and the fighting would stop so both sides could listen to the BBC and find out who was winning”.

The translator pronounced her name as if it were one word, and her audience generally thought she was a man, so when Jeremy Bowen turned up at a checkpoint and they wouldn’t let him pass, he said “I’m from the BBC”.

“Lycedoucet?” they asked, in awe. “Yes”, he said.

As for the current situation in which the Taliban are once more in control and girls are not allowed to be educated, she said:

“Nothing in Afghanistan ever remains the same, there will be changes. I am told 95% of the Taliban do not agree with the most conservative laws.

“Afghans are dreaming of a normal life. The change will come from within. Mothers and fathers will say ‘enough, we have to have a life worth living'”.

Signing books after the event

Our thanks to Roger Green for the photographs.