Lack of compensation irks Kohistan quake survivors

In Kohistan, the survivors are not content with the relief operation as according to them no body is paying attention to them for most of them being the tenants.
In Kohistan, a total area of 7,492 square kilometer, 131 people were killed in the quake out of a total population of 472,570, and the loss of shelter and of livestock was immense.
"We fetched what wood we could, and bought the nails and hammers to put it together ourselves," Firdaus, a quake victim, said. Some army people gave us a tent, but we hardly received any other help and not a penny in compensation for our house," he told IRIN, the UN information unit.
More than 80 percent of people in Kohistan earn their living through agriculture. In return for farming the lands, they receive a portion of the produce and permission to construct a hut on the land. Firdaus was given a few thousand rupees by the landlord to build his two-room hut.
"We have lost everything we had. The house is gone, the crop is damaged, and one of my two buffaloes is dead. But no one is willing to help us as we did not own the land," said Firdaus.
The quake compensation policy, announced by the Pakistan government and funded by the international donor community, is limited to those who owned houses. Following surveys of damaged property, a sum of up to Rs 200,000 (approximately US $3,400) is being given to the owner of each house that collapsed. But this means that tenants, who did not own the land on which their houses stood, or those in larger towns who rented the premises they lived in, have been left, quite literally, out in the cold.
Landlords in many cases, who themselves have suffered financial loss due to the quake, are not willing to use money allocated to them to rebuild accommodation occupied by tenants on a priority basis.
Tenants also maintained that in many cases in Kohistan, the larger, more solidly built homes of landlords remained unaffected, but they had still collected compensation for the fallen shacks of tenants, and, at best, passed on only a tiny fraction of his sum to the tenant. In Kohistan and the neighbouring parts of Shangla district, where winter is harsh and people are routinely left isolated by snows from larger towns, local people also pointed out that rebuilding homes was essential.