BALAKOT, Oct 2: From bricks to wood and plastic sheets, anything goes in the reconstruction of the earthquake-hit Balakot, despite official plans to move the entire city 30 kilometres to the south.

“There’s no question of moving from here,” smiles Mohammed Ajmal, 50, whose clothes business is on the main road running through the centre of the destroyed town.

“We were born here, we will die here,” adds Massood Ahmad, 39, a pharmacist.

His customers agreed.

“Balakot is here, not at Bakrial,” the site chosen by Pakistani authorities more than an hour’s drive away for the building of the “New Balakot”, says Mohammad Hanif, 30, a plumber from a nearby village.

Nearly 4,000 of Balakot’s 30,000 inhabitants were killed by the earthquake of October 8, 2005. The town, the gateway to the Kaghan Valley’s tourist region, was just a few kilometres from the epicentre.

Almost every building was destroyed or seriously damaged by the 7.6-magnitude earthquake. One year later, however, the bazaar has been almost totally rebuilt and work is still under way.

Heaps of brick, sand and gravel lie in the main street and wood piles block the alleyways. Brand new iron shop shutters keep out the low autumn sun in the afternoons.

Mohammad Tamassib, 36, sold furniture before the quake. Today he is doing well from a new trade — in corrugated iron sheets.

“People don’t have enough money to by furniture — often they don’t have a house to put it in anyway. But with corrugated iron business is good,” he says.

Nearby in Medina Plaza, a well-built shopping mall which was one of the few buildings to withstand the quake’s power “thanks to God, not thanks to the concrete”, other shopkeepers now want to get on with rebuilding their homes.

All of them received an initial cheque of Rs25,000 from the government in January to get through the winter. Now they are waiting for their second installment, of Rs100,000, for rebuilding.

“But we are going to stay here. Our ancestors were born and died here and we will do the same,” promise Tamassib and his colleagues.

At the other end of the town, in a tent which serves as his office, the nazim of Balakot has a different opinion.

“They’ll move,” says Junaid Qasim.

“Let them say what they want. When they see what is being built for them, when they understand that they are not being evicted from Balakot and that we are offering in the New Balakot exactly what they had before, you’ll see, they’ll all come.”

The centre of Balakot, which hugs the foaming River Kunhar, is situated directly on top of a seismic fault line and at the outlet of numerous flood-prone streams whose courses were disturbed by the quake’s jolts.

“It’s uninhabitable,” says the mayor, adding that after the earthquake this summer’s monsoon had caused fresh landslides and avalanches on loosened ground.—AFP