ANFGOU, Morocco, Aug 30 (Reuters) - Moroccans voiced shock and anger last winter when 11 inhabitants of the isolated village of Anfgou in the High Atlas mountains died from cold.
Newspaper and TV reporters pushed their way up the snow-filled, cedar-lined valley in off-road vehicles to find a community living in the Dark Ages.

Many victims died when the roofs of their mud houses collapsed under metres of snow. Children with hacking coughs were still playing in the icy streets, barefoot in T-shirts.

Before the crisis ended at least 20 more people, mostly children, had died. With them, so did interest in Anfgou.

But the strangers returned last weekend when the first canvassing agents turned up in Land Rovers emblazoned with posters of candidates in Sept. 7 parliamentary elections.

A hot sun beat down now on the village but the inhabitants gave them a chilly reception.

"Where were you when our children were dying of cold? Why do we see you only now?" said a thin village elder with gnarled teeth. "Get out of here."

One agent said his candidate would improve living conditions in Anfgou and help free a villager imprisoned for grazing animals in the cedar forests.

"We don't trust any of these people," villager Said Ouskina said when the agent had left. "Whoever wins, we'll never know if he went to parliament or went home to sleep for five years."

 

IGNORE AT YOUR PERIL

Crowds of children joyfully gathered up leaflets scattered from campaign vans but almost no one in Anfgou can read. Even if they could, the leaflets are written in Arabic, a foreign language for most of the Berber population.

Anfgou's 1,500-strong farming community, cut off for three months of the year by snow, is far from the image of a modern, progressive Morocco being touted by the government.

The kingdom's cities are seen as the main battleground where secular modernists will do battle with resurgent political Islam against a backdrop of social tension and the threat of attacks by religious radicals.

In contrast, the rural vote is seen as loyalist and conservative.

But political analysts say rural and urban life are closely linked in Morocco and any politician who ignores the countryside does so at his peril.

Some urban tensions are born in Morocco's remote regions.

Rural areas in crisis are emptying as the young seek work in overcrowded cities already struggling with poverty and high unemployment.

That is complicating the government's efforts to eradicate urban slums because newcomers from the provinces arrive to occupy shacks left by people rehoused in state-subsidised flats.

Some of the countryside is occupied by big, irrigated farms that are efficient and prosperous. But most farmers use ancient equipment to eke a precarious living from small plots of land.