Somalis loath to disarm

The old Fiat truck is still smoldering more than 12 hours after a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into its radiator, setting its cargo of fuel alight and injuring three of the passengers.

"This wasn't political. It wasn't the Islamists. This was bandits," says a police officer standing on the sand road, a couple of miles north of the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

"There isn't much we can do," he adds. "We are simply outgunned."

For six months, the notoriously chaotic city was pacified by the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC). Its leaders imposed Islamic law and succeeded in ending almost 16 years of Kalashnikov-fueled racketeering by freelance warlords.

But now, after a two-week preemptive offensive launched by troops from neighboring Ethiopia helped the weak, secular Somalian government force the Islamists to flee, the bandits are starting to return.

Earlier this week, the prime minister announced a 72-hour gun amnesty. Residents could give up their AK-47s, grenades, and "technical" battlewagons – pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machine guns – or face the threat of seeing them taken by force.

But when the deadline came and went Thursday with only a handful of weapons turned in, the government was forced to back down. Mogadishu now has three months to disarm, according to the deputy prime minister.

It is a humiliating and potentially dangerous climbdown.

The truck was attacked at a checkpoint manned by warlords and now residents fear that the old extortionist roadblocks may be going up once again.

"If this is how they are going to govern, then heaven help us," says Abdullahi Ahmed Adam, sipping bitter coffee on a roadside stool.

A woman selling mangos opposite the Villa Baidoa, an old presidential palace designated as a gun collection site, says Ethiopian soldiers inside had collected only one weapon.

"It was only a Thompson," she says laughing at the pre-World War II machine gun which changes hands for only $10 in Mogadishu.

Mogadishu remains awash with weapons held by people too scared to give them up.

Most families keep one in the house to deter robbers. Businesses group together to employ armed guards. And most hotels have a dozen or more militiamen available to visiting dignitaries or journalists for $20 a day or less.

Hussein Aideed, deputy prime minister and minister for the interior, estimates there are $3 billion worth of guns in Somalia. He says the three-day amnesty was ill-conceived. Some businesses should be licensed to hold weapons legally, and the government needs to find a mechanism to disarm clan rivals simultaneously, he adds.

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