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MOGADISHU - Residents of Somalia's chaotic capital filled its bullet-scarred streets yesterday to shop, do business and see the soldiers who turned a weak interim Government into a commanding new ruler in just two weeks.
One of the world's most dangerous cities passed a quiet New Year under the eyes of patrolling Government soldiers and their Ethiopian allies, who drove the Somalia Islamic Courts Council from Mogadishu on Thursday, ending a six-month rule.
It was a rare quiet day for residents who have known little but violent anarchy, bitter clan rivalry and squabbling warlords since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991.
Groups of women and children gathered to gawk at the Ethiopian soldiers whose tanks, planes and artillery gave the Government the power to drive the Islamic Council from the capital and end six months of Islamist rule across much of the south.
The Ethiopians guarded key facilities including the air and sea ports, police bases and the former United States Embassy, and strolled through the marketplaces buying cigarettes with their country's birr currency.
Interim administration officials took over official buildings deserted by the council after a greeting from locals that included scenes of jubilation, fear and protests.
Residents said they hoped the Government could re-establish and maintain the kind of stability in Mogadishu that came after the Islamists drove out warlords, whose fighters had been robbing, killing and intimidating residents for years.
Chillingly, some of those warlords and their fighters have been seen in the city since the Islamists abandoned their defences on Thursday. Shortly after the fighters of the hardline religious movement fled, residents looted their arsenals.
The Government has now given thousands of militiamen three days to disarm, or be disarmed by force, and has promised to help former fighters join the police or military, or find other work. Businessmen said that would have to happen fast if Mogadishu's new rulers expect them to lay down their arms.
"I have six guards with AK-47s. If the Government gives me a guarantee my store will not be broken into, then I will hand over my guns," food importer Farah Isse said.
Many Somalis said the Government had a long way to go to disarm a city of one million, and solve the root problem behind Mogadishu's rule of the gun - crushing poverty.
"That is why we have been in chaos in the past years," restaurant worker Ali Osman said. "If the Government quickly takes charge, opens the seaport and airport and provides jobs for the thousands of youths used as militiamen, then calm will return."
One of the last US-backed warlords to surrender to the Islamists in the battle for Mogadishu, Abdi Hassan Awale - popularly known as Qaybdiid - told a news conference his days of violence were behind him.
"Weapons are the enemy of Somalia, including the ones I have. Will we keep the enemy of Somalia, or leave it? We will lay it down," Qaybdiid said. "The time of warlords is over. What is here is a time of reconciliation."
Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, who entered his Horn of Africa hometown in victory on Friday, said his Administration would not recognise any warlords.
"We do not deal with warlords and the warlord era in Somalia has ended," he said.
As he spoke, his Ethiopian-backed forces were in pursuit of the fleeing leaders of the Islamist movement who brought stability by enforcing strictly Muslim sharia law, but angered Mogadishu residents by shutting cinemas, holding public executions and banning the widely used mild narcotic qat.
- REUTERS
Years of fighting leave a shattered shell of a city
Parts of Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, look like badly maintained Roman ruins, where children tend their goats amid battle-scorched stones in the shadow of some decaying monument.
The centre of Mogadishu, where the transitional government is trying to gain control and wants to move in for business after defeating an Islamist movement, has been almost razed in 16 years of civil warfare.
Built mainly during Italian colonial times, the central districts of this city of one million were meant to resemble a European town, with broad tree-lined avenues, spacious squares and monuments, in contrast to the Arab-style architecture of the old quarters.
Today, that architecture is riddled with bullet marks and craters left by rocket and mortar fire. In the area around what used to be the National Bank, which has been demolished, there is nothing left.
The hotels frequented by Africa's elite until the end of the 1980s have also fallen into ruin, in a wasteland overgrown with weeds.
Only the basic concrete framework remains at the former ministries of education and women's affairs, which have been abandoned for years. Everything else has been stripped out by local people, from electric wiring to window frames.
Displaced families live in huts at Mogadishu's national stadium, full of unemployed youths, and behind the square where strongman Siad Barre's troops used to parade until his ouster in 1991. The post office building has been invaded by people from Jowhar, 90km to the north, as well as local folk.
"Some of us have been here for 10 years," explained Ibrahima, a father of two children in the central hall, which has become a tent city. "We find food but there is no medicine, no school for us, nothing."
- AFP
