Politicizing the Help: Attacks on Polio Vaccination in Pakistan

It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror […]  

I remember when I was with Special Forces – it seems a thousand centuries ago – we went into a camp to inoculate it. The children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile – a pile of little arms. And I remember… I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do.

Apocalypse Now

Before Coppola and Brando get on to the strength, the strength, of the men who could do that – men who could kill without judgement, unlike the American forces – let’s just stick with that initial reaction. Blind horror – directionless and with no answers.

There’s a lot to be said for horror and outrage, to have that reaction to news of events and deeds. Of course it’s bloody and shocking and despicable.

But it’s easier to be blindly aghast and sickened and outraged when that outrage, the news and events, is fed intermittently into your otherwise happy and comfy world by the devices you twist and diffract your life through. Haphazard bulletins and shared links and photos slip between galleries of tax returns that look like Harrison Ford and kittens and the top ten all time greatest movies with the most unflattering use of Lycra. You can allow yourself to be shocked from a point of innocence. ‘Hey, just seen this:…’ It’s like you just entered the room. Like you’re a newborn, every time. A kiddie getting his or her dreams dashed. But you’re not.

We’ve been fighting terrorism for so long now, even if we only count the branded War on Terror here. We're almost bored of all the takes and critiques: religious perversion, religion - period, Arab hatred of the West, Western imperialism, chickens coming home to roost, Cold War replacement, Vietnam 3.0, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter…

Certain things do slap you in the face, though. Bold, text-laden GIFs and JPEGs. Trouser suited women in 1970s Afghanistan and Iran next to today photos of hijabs and burkas (juxtapositions always complicated by colonial/interventionist legacies, but still). Civilian drone strike victims. Factional bombs in the cities of all these places – juvenile limbs and blood in the rubble, wailing women. Blast-dead bodies who look as placidly civilian as the wet-eyed and bewildered people carrying them out. Children missing parts and parents because of IEDs. Open coffins carried aloft. Burning flags (only on occasion – in the grand scheme of things it’s just fucking fabric). Huge murals of tiny thumbnails of soldiers killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ditto journalists.

And whatever you think about terrorism, or our political, cultural and regional understanding of the people and places we fight, bomb, liberate, search and interrogate, I can’t help but feel desolate over a polio vaccination team or its patients getting shot or blown up. When it looks spiteful, more spiteful – purely spiteful.

30^th November

1,100 polio teams are operating in the north-western Pakistan city of Peshawar. Two policemen cover each team. 22-year-old special police force officer Zakir Khan is standing at the side of Canal Road with head constable Yaqoob Khan. They have been guarding the Gulshan Rehman team of polio workers in the Bahadur Kallay area and are returning to the police station. Canal Road actually has the waterway running between the two lanes of traffic. Zakir and Yaqoob are shot in the head by two men on a motorbike. The shooters are unidentified – suspected militants. The police officers are taken to Lady Reading Hospital. Zakir Afridi’s dead. He was good at cricket. [1]

7^th October

The final day of a three-day UN-backed vaccination campaign in the Badbher area of Peshawar.

Niaz Gul is the unpaid head of the peace militia (Mashogagar Aman Lashkar). It’s been militants v. police with him in the middle since 2008 – “Without the support of locals, police cannot do anything in this area.” This morning he’s a passenger in a police van. He’s accompanying Sajid Hussain, assistant sub-inspector of the local station, to finalize security for the polio vaccination campaign in the area.

The van arrives: the patterned metal gates of Garhi Mali Khel dispensary. There’s a rusted metal sign above painted with script. The straddling walls are all bare brick and cracked rendering. Policeman Hameedullah Khan is in another van. He sees the explosion that leaves a manhole-sized bloodstain in the dirt outside after everything’s been cleared away and cordoned off later. “The people in the van started crying for help. There was a thick cover of dust…”

An IED. A bomb made from a pressure cooker. 4kg of explosive. Metal and nails are added as shrapnel. No, not shrapnel; shrapnel isn’t added. It’s only deliberate in as far as it’s inevitable that a bomb’s casing will fly out and tear and burn people to shreds – nails and metal placed in a bomb aren’t ‘shrapnel.’ The BBC’s video shows an ensuing hospital ward scrum to tend to people who are all blood and bandages.

Lady Reading Hospital. Syed Jamil Shah is the spokesman. He says that Sajid Hussain was brought in dead while Niaz Gul died in hospital. 12 others are wounded. A photo of a child carried into the hospital stings.

Ahmed Marwat speaks for the Jundullah faction of the Pakistani Taliban, who claim responsibility: “Jews and the United States want to stamp out Islamic beliefs through these [vaccination] drops.” [2]


28^th May

18-year-old Sharafata Bibi is within a few weeks of getting married. She dies euphemistically ‘instantly’ when shot by two all in black gunmen on a motorbike. They shoot her and the 20-year-old Sumbal Gul with her, who lives between comatose and conscious until 8^th June. Before getting shot and dying they were administering polio vaccine to the under-fives of Kaga Wala village, near to Peshawar again. Sumbal was on Rs500 a day (£3 and under) for that job. [3]

It goes on (vaccination team member Mohammad Yousuf on the 13th December, a medic at a vaccination clinic on the 21^st, another medic yesterday).

According to Elias Durry of the World Health Organization, the polio scheme had planned to administer to 34 million children across Pakistan. 1.5 million have missed out. Polio’s the one where you see little children too young to realize or smile like they’re paralysed for life.

It does seem like a great divide between world views and cultures and fighting techniques. Undermining the help …for what? To spite the enemy’s (the US, the West, non believers, UNICEF) efforts? To let chaos and fear aid your agenda? Because you actually believe that shit? Poisoning the water? Sterilizing Islam? Espionage?

Disingenuous. Terrorism is potent. In some ways it’s potent because any idiot can do it, which makes it such an all-out assault from a defence/security/intelligence perspective, but in some ways it’s potent because it can be cleverly organized. It knows the global audience – from the small portion that down the Kool-Aid to those who loathe and fight it and all the shades between. And it always knows what to say, what story to create. Do they believe that shit? Does it matter? Vaccination in Pakistan has been a WHO project since 1994. Resistance and suspicion exists, pre-existed, for the Pakistani Taliban or preachers or whoever to exploit.

In 2005 Maulana Fazlullah ‘Mullah Radio’ set up a radio station in the Swat Valley, preaching that polio vaccinations were a US attempt to sterilize children. Attacks on health workers in and by the local community ensued, as did more radio stations with a similar theme. Fazlullah’s station was giving Koran readings and promoting more literal interpretations, persuasively attacking female education, attacking the West (effective, what with all the drone strikes) as well as Musharraf’s government. Fazlullah has quite a record now, a million miles from operating a ski resort chairlift in his pre-teens. His men blew up girls’ schools, burned down music shops, banned TV, named and threatened to behead those who were breaking the Taliban’s laws… Fazlullah gave the order for the attempted assassination of schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai. And he became leader of the Pakistani Taliban after the previous leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, was killed in a US drone strike on 1^st November.

I don’t know. You see a group of people beheading others, shooting schoolgirls, nail bombing polio vaccination teams and squawking about religion, defending beliefs and customs and ways of life from the Western conspiracy, from corruption – killing their own country’s civilians, their own religion’s devotees, in the name of protecting through forced promotion their personal claim on a definitive, authentic way of living, of observance? You think: ‘you murderous, crazy, manipulative aberration. What is your motivation? You want to be the uncompromising leader of a mountain of corpses? Congratulations.’ You go Brando. You go innocent Western soldier or civilian who believes in a fair fight and can’t comprehend the others out there.

We shouldn’t offset it quite so clearly – that naïve, noble soldiery and Western values are confounded and devastated by terrorists and combatants with the awful and awe inspiring WILL to do whatever it takes to kill and undermine. Westerners may or may not be confounded by it at individual level, but that rendering of the conflict does not acknowledge the disingenuousness of the decision makers and planners on both sides.

Because after all the years of calculated mindlessness – the ‘Western conspiracy’ fearmongering by preachers securing their own status – that thing did happen. Bin Laden was gone. A factor: the CIA had paid for a phoney hepatitis vaccination scheme to confirm his whereabouts through DNA collection. Dr Shakil Afridi was paid to run a campaign in Abbottabad between March and April 2011. He gained access to what turned out to be bin Laden’s compound but could not get DNA samples. That’s not the point… “There could hardly have been a more stupid venture, and there was bound to be a backlash, especially for polio.” It hit polio vaccinations, it hit Save the Children. It was cynical, and it proved, advertised, the cynicism of the side that’s meant to look candidly good, open and noble in all of this – hearts and minds and all that. The abuse, the politicization of the help is supposedly what we are devastated by, not tactically manipulating.

People who are good at communicating but bad at morality mess with us. They rely on what we popularly digest, on our familiar narratives and expectations, to deliver the things they want the way we want. Things are optimized for app-laden devices or tailored by soapbox ideologues or TV news or press briefings or militant training camps or… The people who have all the case studies and perspectives available to them, the people who know better, shepherd and steer, filter and water down their field of expertise to meet our opinions. They sell events to us and to them (the extremist wannabes, the undecided locals). Devastated polio vaccination teams: they get Western conspiracy - the bloodshed is the collaborators getting theirs; we get incomprehensible tragedy, and hand-wringing, mandate-ensuring leaders. Whoever you're trying to sway, there’s a lot riding on your ability to appear shocked and outraged by events.

Meanwhile, the Taliban in Afghanistan have begun supporting polio vaccinations this year – so long as only ‘unbiased’ people participate in the campaigns. They apparently support all programmes “which work for the healthcare of the helpless people of our country.” 

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 [1] Dawn.com, 'Better police deployment for polio teams in Peshawar'
Express Tribune, 'Policeman shot dead, another injured after escorting polio teams'
Dawn.com, 'Policeman killed in attack on polio team'
Express Tribune, 'In the line of duty: Taking a bullet for polio' 

[2] Express Tribune, 'Garhi Mali Khel blast: Niaz Gul fought for peace till he breathed his last'
Express Tribune, 'Rising insurgency: Blast targeting polio workers, police kills 2'
Dawn.com, 'Polio team attacked near Peshawar; 2 dead'
The Nation, '‘Cooker bomb’ hits polio drive, kills two'
Firstpost, 'Blast near polio workers kills 2 in Pakistan’s Peshawar'  

[3] Dawn.com, 'In the line of fire'
The News International, 'Polio volunteer killed in Peshawar attack'
Pakistan Gender News, 'A thousand cuts: Young polio worker puts life at risk for Rs500 per day'