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| November 7, 2005 | Monday | Shawwal 4, 1426 |
Survivors determined not to leave mountain homes
KAGHAN VALLEY, Nov 6: Barely a house is still standing in earthquake-shattered Kaghan Valley and in a few week time it will lie under a blanket of deep snow.
But sitting in a tent near the ruins of his electronics shop, 25-year-old Mohammad Ashraf says he has no plans to leave, despite pleas from the army, which is trying to avert a new wave of deaths among earthquake survivors this winter.
Ashraf, who has lost both legs in a car accident, said he always stays in the winter and he has nowhere else to go.
He might though try to travel to the town of Mansehra, about 100 km and numerous landslides away, to buy food to last him until spring.
“Maybe tomorrow the road will be open,” Ashraf said by the light of a single flickering candle. “If not, then my friends will carry me over the mountains.”
Ashraf then buries his head in his hands and cries.
Although temperatures are already bitterly cold at night, most of the subsistence farmers of the remote Kaghan Valley in North-West Frontier Province do not want to leave.
They say they want to stay with their cattle and are highly suspicious of the tent camps set up in the lowlands by the government and international aid agencies, where conditions are spartan at best and miserably squalid at worst.
“There is a lot of panic in those camps and no discipline at all,” said 20-year-old driver Naveed Hussain. “And the food supply is just for one month — what do we do then?”
The United Nations, struggling to provide shelter for three million homeless and food for a more than a million in some of the most forbidding mountain terrain on earth, now fears a second wave of deaths as colder weather takes hold in coming weeks.
Another Kaghan resident, Mohammad Amir, who heads an extended family of 15, said he planned to repair his home before the snows and had no intention of going to a refugee camp.
BLEAK FORECAST: The first snows of winter have already fallen on mountain peaks and the Meteorological Office says widespread showers are expected from next Thursday, which would fall as snow over 5,000 feet by next weekend.
The Kaghan Valley settlements are about 6,000 feet up and are usually carpeted in deep snow from late December until spring.
Major Khalid Jamil, senior army relief coordinator in Kaghan, said he had been trying to persuade the villagers to come down the mountains, without much success.
“They don’t listen,” he said. “They don’t understand. I doubt people will survive if they stay here in tents.”
Villagers said the wealthier 20 per cent of the tens of thousands of inhabitants of the valley who have family or houses in the lowlands always leave in the winter.
“The people who are leaving now are the ones who leave every winter,” said Bruno Kouualczewski of French relief agency Medicines Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders), which has set up an emergency hospital in the valley.
Despite their reluctance to leave, many Kaghan residents appear still in shock from the disaster and few have attempted to rebuild their damaged homes, though there are exceptions.
Abdul Khanan said he and his family in the village of Lari were completely “senseless” after the quake, but one week ago they started rebuilding their house.
The walls still standing are dangerously cracked and the wooden doors have fallen out. In the courtyards they have rigged up three makeshift tents of plastic sheet but these are not big enough for the whole family of 30, so six men sleep outside.
Liaqat Hussain, 20, and his two brothers came to help rebuild the house, carefully laying stone upon stone using mud as cement.
“First we help them, then they help us. I think it will take about one month,” Hussain said, while Khanan commented: “Now we feel better, because we are doing something.”
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