Beautiful Mogadishu

"You got out of Somalia just in time," people keep telling me. It seems they're right. I just came back from a week in Mogadishu, sometimes described as the most dangerous city in the world, and now things have really started to get nasty there. Peacekeeping troops from Uganda have just arrived in the country - the first international military mission in the country since the early 1990s, and the "Black Hawk Down" incident that drove U.S. troops out of Somalia.

Insurgents are attacking the Ugandans daily, and civilians are being killed - 12 people in one attack alone on Wednesday. It's not clear who the insurgents are, except that they're anti-government, although many people in Mogadishu believe they're linked to the recently ousted Islamic courts militias, whose leaders are urging an uprising against "foreign forces" inside the country.

Not that the previous week was completely quiet. Every day in Mogadishu we heard something - gunshots, a mortar blast or rumors of worse. If Somalia could export rumors, it would be a rich country. I was staying in a place called, hopefully, the Peace Hotel. The owner, a young guy named Bashiir, refuses to host government delegations, U.N. officials or other groups that would make him a lot of money, but could also turn the hotel into an insurgent target. So the Peace is relatively safe. When I was there the only other guests were a Canadian journalist and a handful of Somali-Norwegian NGO workers.

The best thing about Mogadishu is the weather, cooled by the ocean breeze and perfect in the evenings. In the 1970s, thanks to the pristine beaches and Italianate architecture, it was one of the most picturesque cities in Africa, and nowadays you can still buy t-shirts that say "Beautiful Mogadishu." Of course, if you're a foreigner, you can really only buy them inside your (heavily guarded) hotel compound.

Anyway, because of the great weather, we spent our evenings on the roof of the Peace, eating fresh fish for dinner and listening to the Somalis tell stories about their country's glorious past - and, more entertainingly, the bumbling new government. Several of the stories revolved around illiterate Cabinet ministers who contradicted communiques from their own ministries - because they couldn't read them.

Occasionally, the laughter would stop when the sound of gunfire rang through the air, which happened at least once a night. Then each of the Somalis would be on the phone with friends to figure out who or what was hit, and within minutes we'd have a pretty reliable report, which in itself provided some measure of security. Like I said, Somalis love to talk, which made it a pretty fantastic place to be a journalist. But there's a lot of rumor and fiction to sort through, and very few methods of getting accurate information other than talking to as many people as possible.

In that spirit, I ventured out of the Peace compound every day to meet people in various parts of the city. Traveling in Mogadishu these days, you need an armed escort, so everywhere we drove, we were trailed by Bashiir's personal security detail - four guys with machine guns riding in an SUV. This was moderately reassuring except for the times that we got stuck in traffic in dicey, government-controlled neighborhoods and the SUV was stuck right along with us.

A few times I went to meet government officials at their hotels. (The government being weak and Mogadishu being unstable, the officials haven't tried to buy homes or put down any roots in town; they live out of shabby VIP rooms in rundown hotels.) We'd get near the hotel and suddenly there would be cars all around us - usually minibuses, sometimes passenger cars ferrying members of government or their flunkies.

These were the moments when I sensed danger - that if the hotel were to be hit, and all government hotels in Mogadishu have been bombed recently, we and our security detail would be stuck in traffic, unable to move.

That fear hit home when I read about Wednesday's attack, which occurred just outside the Global Hotel. I'd spent a couple of afternoons there. On my last day in Mogadishu I had lunch there with one of the guests, the mayor of Mogadishu, Mahamud Hassan Ali, who goes by the nickname (everyone in Somalia has a nickname) is Adde Gabbow. Just the idea of being mayor of Mogadishu is pretty astonishing, a thought that New York Times correspondent Marc Lacey spelled out beautifully in a profile last year.

Adde Gabbow is a pretty interesting guy. For several years, like so many Somali expatriates, he lived in the Minneapolis area, where he ran a janitorial service and built it into one of the largest such companies in the state. But when his boyhood friend, Ali Mohammed Gedi, was named prime minister of the new Somali transitional government, Adde Gabbow was asked to return to serve his home country. His wife refused to go with him. His two adult children remained in university in the U.S., one an undergraduate and the other a Master's candidate. Both will graduate this spring, and Adde Gabbow plans to be there for both ceremonies.

Lunch was a Dr. Atkins nightmare - rice and pasta and three different sugary fruit juices - but I focused on the fish. I asked the mayor what Somalia needed from the international community. "We need a Marshall Plan," he said. "We need the entire social network to be rebuilt. Somalia was destroyed." The U.S., U.K. and other donor countries have ponied up tens of millions of dollars to bolster the government. But its leaders are not doing a great job of showing they're worthy of it. They refuse to negotiate with political opponents, and Somalia being an intensely clan-oriented society, that stubbornness is part of what's fueling the insurgency.

I asked the mayor whether he thought the government needed to be more inclusive. He sort of shrugged and didn't really answer the question. The meal was ending, and now we were getting into the sensitive stuff. After a while I gave up and asked him about his life in the U.S. "Minneapolis is very cold, but a very nice city," he said through an interpreter, and added proudly that his local paper (the formerly McClatchy-owned Minneapolis Star-Tribune) wrote a profile of him when he was named mayor.

It surprised me that he could have spent several years in the Midwest, built such a strong business and raised two successful children and not have gained at least some mastery of English. It spoke to the other talents he must have possessed in abundance, and to rescue his city, or at least keep it together, he needs those talents now more than ever.