Pak.'s wild west a gun-lover's dream

PESHAWAR, OCT. 2. Secret pen guns, pocket guns, handguns, shotguns, machineguns, anti-aircraft guns - the wild west of Pakistan is a gun-lover's dream. Almost any type of gun can be bought or copied, and manufacturers and sellers are optimistic that a predicted U.S. blitz on Afghanistan for sheltering Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in the attacks on New York and Washington, could fuel a mini-boom in demand.

``If they attack, I will be able to make more guns and sell more guns,'' said Yaser Afridi, sitting in his shop surrounded by display cases full of double-barrel shotguns, handguns and copies of Russian Kalashnikov assault rifles, the weapon of choice for the Mujahideen (holy warriors) in Afghanistan.

Afridi is part of a gun culture that has been passed down through the generations and has its heart in the village of Darra Adam Khel, 30 km south of Peshawar. The rows of shops sell guns of almost every description, much like strings of stores selling shirts in a tourist hotspot. ``I belong to Darra. I have people in Darra who can make any gun,'' said Afridi, whose shop opened just after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

The Government has put Darra off limits to foreigners for years, trying to hide the lawless frontier image as it tries to cope with an overflow of guns into the big cities.

Men stride along the main road with armloads of freshly-produced rifles. The town later reverberated with gunfire as purchasers slipped behind the shops to test out their weapons on the surrounding hills before concluding the purchases.

Men and boys, sat cross-legged in scores of adjoining shops producing perfect copies of weapons - right down to engraved serial numbers and countries of manufacture - with nothing more sophisticated than punches, files, a hand-held power drill and a small lathe.

Violence in Afghanistan has always fuelled the gun culture in the North-West Frontier Province. Broken weapons, scrap medal and used bullets from the decade-long battle with Soviet occupiers in the 1980s provided material for the gun industry.

``The manufacturers happily expect that, with the start of a war in the region, scrap will once again be easily and abundantly available,'' said the Dawn. ``The prices of ammunition, which had registered a 600 per cent increase, especially those for kalashnikovs, would also fall because there would be millions of empty shells, which could be refilled and used in the locally and as well as foreign-made arms,'' it said.

Guns are especially a way of life in the semi- autonomous tribal areas that make up about 25 per cent of the province, and where long, bloody tribal feuds - mostly over women or land - are common and smugglers, especially of drugs, are kings. ``This is a city, so there are no guns, but in the tribal areas everyone has a gun, everyone has a kalashnikov,'' said Afridi.

His shop had posters of little boys with anti-aircraft guns - ``we can make those'' - and of Indian helicopters being shot down. The gun dealer, sporting a New York yankees cap, added that he was against the U.S. He sells copies of kalashnikovs for Rs. 4,000 ($62). ``We sell a lot of copies of kalashnikovs and M- 16s, they are the best guns in the world.'' An original M-16, mainstay of the U.S. army, costs Rs. 80,000, Afridi said, but a Pakistani copy knocked off in Darra was Rs. 20,000 or less. While those guns are the most popular, he said it was possible to copy any type of gun. ``Give me two or three days and we can copy a gun we have not seen before. There will not be even one difference between the original and the copy,'' he added.

- Reuters

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