SOMALIA:While celebrating a return of their freedoms denied under Sharia law, Somalis still fear a return to anarchy, writes Rob Crillyin Mogadishu
Weder Bremen were playing Barcelona in the Champions League when the Islamic militias came calling at the Hadramud cinema.
Idris Ibrahim Dhagey kept the front door locked while his handful of secret football fanatics slipped out the back. "They would have flogged me, shaved my head and thrown me into one of their prisons if they knew what I was doing," he says among the rubble of the old Italian building, where goats pick through the weeds in the open air auditorium.
For six months, the movie house could not show the American action movies and Bollywood romances loved by his Somali customers.
The Union of Islamic Courts, which seized Mogadishu in June, ordered his doors closed as they imposed Sharia law on the capital.
Instead, he would secretly allow a handful of friends to watch Premiership or Champions League games projected on to the huge whitewashed wall.
But now the Islamists are gone.
Today Mogadishu is in the hands of the country's two-year-old interim government.
As their forces - backed by Ethiopian warplanes and troops - chase Islamic hardliners towards the Kenyan border, the city is relaxing once more. Western music pumps across hotel dancehalls, and the crowds are flocking back to the Hadramud.
Dhagey has been pulling in 700 movie fans a day, each ready to part with the €0.10 entry fee.
"I liked the peace and security the courts brought," he says, "but I am a businessman and need to make money. This freedom is better."
There is a price to be paid.
By day, Mogadishu's streets of sand are quiet. They are no longer clogged with children playing football and donkeys pulling water wagons.
By night, the city is deserted: silent but for the sound of automatic gunfire.
People are kept at home not by a curfew but by fear.
From time to time a lone 4x4 speeds through the crumbling streets, AK47 muzzles bristling from the windows.
The courts brought security to a city riddled by bullets and anarchy for 15 years since the collapse of Siad Barre's brutal regime. His was the last government to wield any authority over a country where blood feuds date back generations and where kinship comes before all else.
Memories of Mogadishu's warlords also remain fresh.
They extracted hundreds of thousands of dollars at checkpoints and from protection rackets. Carjackings were common and shootings an everyday occurrence before the Sharia courts took over.
The guns have already returned to Bakaara market.
Arabey Ma'Alim Abdulle has the job of trying to co-ordinate security for one of the streets in the bazaar.
"When the courts were here it was like the days of Siad Barre when the security guard carried a torch and a watchman's stick. That's what I carried," he said.
As the Islamists fled Mogadishu, he dug out the AK47 which had lain hidden under his bed for the past six months.
Ali Mohamed Gedi, the country's prime minister, has ordered the surrender of all guns in private hands as the first step towards securing Mogadishu.
But his demand has been largely ignored.
Yesterday nothing but a second World War-era Thompson gun had been handed to the Ethiopian soldiers guarding a collection point at an old presidential house.
Ethiopia has been the government's strongest supporter since the faltering administration took up position in the provincial town of Baidoa. They saw it as the best hope for preventing an Islamic state developing on their doorstep.
It was largely their warplanes, artillery and troops which defeated the Islamists and secured the capital.
Now their forces are pursuing the remnants of the Islamic courts towards the Kenyan border.
There was little sign of the Ethiopian war machine in the city yesterday, apart from tank tracks around the overgrown grounds and tumbledown walls of the old American embassy.
Both the Somali and Ethiopian prime ministers have this week promised their speedy withdrawal, leaving Somalis to wonder what comes next.
Analysts warn of a political vacuum.
If Gedi's unpopular government fails to win over the Mogadishu clans, then the capital could once again fall into the hands of the warlords or allow the return of the surviving Islamists.
Matt Bryden, consultant to the International Crisis Group, said Gedi's government needed to woo the Hawiye clan - the main supporters of the courts.
"You have a state of confrontation between the Hawiye and the government, and that's where a settlement has to be pursued," he said.
"That means some sort of settlement that makes the Hawiye feel like they are part of the government."
This week the dancers returned to the Global dancehall. Women shed their headscarves and bared their arms as young Somalis partied to a soundtrack of gangsta rap and Kenyan hip hop.
Mustafa Haji Abdullahi, the 22-year-old chief operating officer of Telcom Somalia, said the dancing would pale beside a return to anarchy.
"As a businessman I want stability," he said. "I'm already back to paying bribes."
Now everyone was waiting to see whether the government could consolidate its position or whether it would disintegrate under the pressure of Somalia's bloody history.
"All it would take is for one Ethiopian soldier to make a mistake, to shoot someone, to be accused of rape, and then it is all over," he said.
"We would be in for another 16 years of mayhem."