0
KABUL: Guns are the law of the land in Afghanistan, where they are used to protect homes, invade homes, settle tribal feuds, raise taxes, celebrate weddings, run private armies and wage war.
And now the fledgling Afghan government wants to get rid of them.
Since the US-led coalition ousted the Taliban from power in late 2001, some order has returned to Kabul, but outside the capital the gun is still king.
Recent fighting between rival warlords shows the uphill battle President Hamid Karzai faces with an ambitious plan to crack down on an out-of-control Kalashnikov culture.
Karzai hopes to disarm warlord armies by the time elections are held in June 2004.
But that would require backing from people like Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose private army battled fighters backing his old rival Ustad Atta Mohammad, an ethnic Tajik, in northern Afghanistan for several days in February.
The fighting, which left at least six dead, was caused by an attempt by Dostum to disarm Atta’s fighters, one of Atta’s generals said.
Not surprisingly in Afghanistan, where allegiances shift as quickly as the wind, Atta and Dostum are nominally on the same side as members of the transitional government.
Dostum is a deputy defence minister in the central government and Atta a corps commander and overall commander for the northern areas of Jamiat-e-Islami, the dominant faction in the Northern Alliance, the backbone of Karzai’s administration.
Bringing the warlords to heel is considered one of the biggest tasks in Karzai’s bid to replace the rule of the gun with the rule of law, quite apart from dealing with the continued threat posed by remnants of the former Taliban regime and their Al Qaeda allies.
RITE OF MANHOOD: It’s not just the warlords. Gun ownership is a rite of manhood in many villages. And guns are used for protection, to carry out bloody tribal feuds that last decades, and for instant tax collection on roads by small-town bandits.
The recent fighting came as Karzai was at a conference in Japan seeking funds for a plan to disarm warlord armies, find alternative jobs for some fighters and absorb others into a fledgling national army. Karzai was pledged $51 million, but the programme is expected to cost almost three times that.
Afghanistan’s gun culture rolled out of control during the 10-year Soviet occupation in the 1980s when the United States and others started supplying the mujahideen with billions of dollars of worth of weapons, including the latest model Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.
When the Soviets left, warlords turned the weapons on each other in a battle for Kabul, causing vastly more destruction than during Soviet rule, and then against the Taliban.
After Sept 11, 2001, guns and cash flowed into Afghanistan again as the United States armed warlords such as Dostum to help fight the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, blamed for the attacks on the United States.
EIGHT MILLION GUNS: There are thought to be eight million guns in Afghanistan, which has a population of about 27 million.
The disarming of militias is made difficult by ethnic divisions Karzai acknowledged with a pledge not to play favourites among the country’s diverse ethnic and tribal groups.—Reuters
