I first visited Baghdad in 1977. Both my younger brother Raafat and the niece of my mother, Mona Benjamin Baroody – wife of Faisal Damlouji – and her family were living.
Four years later, I returned to represent Nissan Middle East at the opening ceremony of a football tournament that had just been sponsored by the Japanese car manufacturer. Both the client and the agency were convinced that football was the most popular sport amongst Arab youth, and statistics had shown that the majority of GCC residents were young.
The idea for this sponsorship had come from a sports event management company called Med Sports, which was owned and managed by an old colleague of mine by the name of Nabil Kazan. Nabil was one of the first generation of advertising men in the Middle East, having begun his career at Pharaon Advertising, before establishing Publicite Kazan with the financial support of his father in 1961. Shortly afterwards, Nabil went to London where he trained at Lintas. In 1969, he merged his agency with Jean-Pierre Rainier’s Éclair Publicite to form Éclair Kazan. In 1981, this agency was sold to the Saudi Tihama Group, which, in turn sold it to JWT in 2000[1]. The sale of his agency to the Saudis led Nabil to put an end to his advertising career and to move into sport events management. It was then that Med Sports was launched.
I first met Nabil in 1971 when I went to meet him at Éclair Kazan, which was located on the first floor of the Ayad building on Graham Station, just off Rue John Kennedy in Ras Beirut. Intermarkets had just won the Beecham account, which had earlier been handled by Éclair Kazan, and my visit was part of the handover. What struck me during this first encounter was the fact that Nabil and Jean-Pierre Rainier shared the same desk.
Since then, I had met Nabil many times, particularly when he moved to Dubai, and we became members of the same social group. This could have been the reason why I was the first-person Nabil approached after he had established Med Sports and developed its first event with a gentleman named Pierre Kikhia. Like the UK, Spain and Germany, the project was to organize an annual championship for Arab football clubs. I helped Nabil in selling the title sponsorship of this event to my clients, Nissan Middle East, so Nabil and I travelled to Baghdad to participate in the opening of the Nissan Arab Clubs Championship.
Med Sports attended to all our travel arrangements, so we had a VIP reception at Baghdad Airport, and we were quickly whisked to the top floor of Al Rasheed Hotel. The hotel was overbooked by the participating teams and the management had resorted to a forced formula of room sharing. Nabil and I were privileged to share a two-room suite. The opening ceremony was held in the early evening of the day we arrived, and it was spectacular. I was personally emotionally uplifted when the Lebanese football team marched past the grandstand.
Kikhia and the Iraqi hosts then invited us to a maskouf fish dinner at one of the lively restaurants on the bank of the Tigris. We retired around midnight as we were keen to attend all the matches planned for the first day. As we were about to sleep, we were awakened by the sound of laughter and giggling on our floor. I jumped out of bed and stepped into the foyer of our suite to see Nabil peeping out of the main door in his pyjamas. I joined him and saw what appeared to be the end of a crowded party, which included ravishing young ladies with blonde hair in colorful low-cut dresses. Young men in tuxedos and bowties, as well as many policemen, were scattered across the entire top floor. When Nabil enquired what was happening with one of the police officers, we were told that a private party was still very active in the Royal Suite, which was occupied by Uday the son of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president.
I returned to my room thinking about my luck of sharing hotel floors with presidents. At the Imperial Hotel in Vienna, where I was staying because of a Dream Whip TVC shoot, I had heard a strange sound behind my door and opened it to see two security guards working for the Libyan president, Muammar Al Gaddafi. They were eavesdropping because they had found out through the hotel guest list that I was Lebanese. And then there was my experience on the sixth floor of the Cyprus Hilton with the Cypriot president Georges Vasiliou and his state visitor, Lech Wałęsa, the president of Poland.
In 1991, I returned to Baghdad one last time at the invitation of the Iraqi government, which was in the process of stopping its financing of pan-Arab print media such as Al Watan Al Arabi and Al Dastour. Through these publications it had been trying to spread a positive image of the country and its president. The alternative plan was to launch a satellite TV service that reached Arab speakers around the world and overcame the still sizeable illiteracy barrier.
At Intermarkets we had a senior employee called Jihad Ballout, who relayed to Erwin Guerrovich and me an invitation from the Iraqi authorities. This invitation had been delivered via Jihad’s father, Ali Ballout, the publisher, and editor-in-chief of Al Dastour newspaper, which was published out of Paris and was known to be openly and proudly pro-Iraqi. Since Iraq was governed by a no-fly zone imposed by the western coalition of the US and the UK, the invitation was an overland one starting from Amman in Jordan. We received our wake-up call at the Amman Marriott Hotel at 4am, and when we went downstairs, we found three Mercedes limousines waiting for the two of us. It was explained that the drive would take 13 hours and that it would be very dangerous to stop at any time on the journey. The two additional cars were meant to be used as escape vehicles every time one of the cars broke down.
We arrived at Al Rasheed Hotel at 8pm. The electric power was down, and the hotel lobby was lit by kerosene lanterns. The lobby was full of tables, upon which Iraqi housewives had displayed expensive silver cutlery, chinaware, and their own personal jewelry, which they were offering for sale to the hotel guests so they could feed their families. This was the sad effect of the continuous war in Iraq.
At the Ministry of Information, the next day we were offered the opportunity to help the Iraqi government establish a TV station in Paris, which would beam its transmission to the Arab world via satellite. We were asked to pay all the set-up and running expenses, deriving our revenue from selling advertising airtime. When we told our hosts that this was not our line of work nor our expertise, hence we had no interest in such a project, there were three days of suspense as we waited to receive the green light to travel back home.