Pak quake survivors vow to stay put

A Pakistani woman prepares food for her son in a relief camp in Balakot yesterday. Pakistan said it was ready to open five designated crossing points on the de facto border with India in Kashmir, even though India has said it is only ready to open one.. PHOTO: AFP

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 Pakistani 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 (60 miles) and numerous landslides away, to buy food to last him until spring. The Pakistani army says opening the road may take another three to four days.

"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 Khagan Valley in Pakistan's 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 official death toll from the devastating earthquake that hit North West Frontier and Pakistani Kashmir stands at more than 73,000, with another 1,300 killed in Indian Kashmir.

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.

Last week, President Pervez Musharraf told highlanders they would need to come down the mountains as they would not survive in tents. But many, like those in the Khagan valley, are reluctant to do so as they fear losing their livestock and land.