Word: mogadishu
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Getting a story out of Africa is never easy, but this week's cover package posed a special challenge for the veteran Africa hands in TIME's Nairobi bureau -- operations central for our correspondents in Somalia. Not only did the army of print and video journalists descending on Mogadishu fill every available hotel room and airplane seat, but they also emptied neighboring capitals of supplies. While our resourceful office manager, Grace Okeyo, scoured Nairobi for bottled water and U.S. currency (a commodity in increasingly short supply), Nairobi reporter Clive Mutiso pulled every string he knew to get TIME space...
Acting Nairobi bureau chief Andrew Purvis, who inherited Wilde's mongrel dogs, Whiskey and Pee Wee, along with his old job, has been in Mogadishu long enough to watch the city go from outright anarchy to "a place that almost feels safe." Bringing peace to Somalia's interior, however, may take some doing. In Baidoa, Purvis saw a young Somali no more than eight years old waltz up to a relief worker who was carrying a bag of cheese-flavored chips. "The kid had an AK-47 draped over his shoulder, its muzzle almost dragging in the dust," says Purvis...
...attempt to head off armed resistance, U.S. officials are meeting in Ethiopia with representatives of the major Somali factions. Some clan leaders, including the Mogadishu kingpin Mohammed Farrah Aidid, claim that they welcome U.S. intervention; Aidid even staged pro-American parades last week. But Western analysts suspect he simply hopes to improve his own position. If he and his rivals feel power slipping away, their attitude could quickly change. Clan chieftains do not, in any case, control all the thugs marauding through the country...
...because Somalia is doable, as the President likes to say, and the others are not. Bush is still smarting from the criticism that he was too slow to help the Iraqi Kurds in the aftermath of the Gulf War. He is also aggrieved that U.S. supplies airlifted to Mogadishu since August have been stuck in warehouses or stolen at gunpoint in the streets. Secretary- General Boutros-Ghali has made sharp references to the West's habit of ignoring Africa, and has demanded "a countrywide show of force...
Bush could have opted for something less dramatic. The day before Thanksgiving, his advisers gave him three possibilities: expand the U.N. peacekeeping force by adding 3,500 troops to the 500 Pakistanis hunkered down at the Mogadishu airport; provide air and sea support for a U.N. intervention force; or send in a U.S. division under U.N. auspices -- the Pentagon's surprising proposal. Bush went straight for option three, so quickly that the meeting lasted only an hour. "The number of deaths was going up," explains a senior official in Washington, "and the number of people we were reaching was going...