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'  

A Good Cause

#101586583 / gettyimages.com

Yesterday it became clear that, over three and a half hours, the 52-year-old divorcee's rampage through a 25-mile stretch of towns and villages in Cumbria had escalated from the methodical execution of a group of men he considered to have wronged him to a killing spree of terrifying randomness.

(Cahal Milmo, Mark Hughes and Patrick Hill, ‘The grievances and grudges that drove Derrick Bird over the edge’, The Independent, 4th June 2010.)

Derrick Bird is a narrative in flux at the moment. The police gave us that mystifying "grudge and random" motive, or lack of motive. Surely both undermine each other. Random shootings that were not all random, and so not really random at all. Grudge killings of his brother and associates that led to non-grudge killings of strangers, suggesting that the anger or emotion was not solely directed at the people Derrick Bird supposedly had grievances against.

I’ve often wondered about my preoccupation with understanding why somebody kills another (a preoccupation that appears to be shared by the media, and thus, supposedly, a lot of people in this and other countries). If they weren’t provoked, then was there something wrong with them. Were they violently antisocial, did they read a lot into the looks they got from strangers on the street? If they were provoked, what was the provocation?

I think for me, and thus possibly for the media et al, it might be that I wonder: if I were in that situation, would I have warranted death in the eyes of the killer. Could I have handled the situation in a way that would have saved me? Perhaps I would have come across as a punningly disarming figure, or at least anonymous amongst other targets. Perhaps I would have been the have a go Rambo, punching or knocking the killer to the floor, dispatching the dispatcher. As far as we can see, I, you, and most other people would have died if caught in the glance of Derrick Bird during those hours on Wednesday.

Killing and suicide are significant in literature; they are used to explore the ultimate emotions – what remains important to, or in the mind of, a person who is about to lose everything, all of sensation and experience, into eternity. What do they think about, what do they say, what do they renounce when they’ve come beyond duplicity – the deathbed confession if you like.

What was Mr Bird’s ultimate - settling scores and then taking a few more down with him? Think of the ramifications of that (that being the current best guess of the media and its approached witnesses as to why the shootings happened). Your last act before oblivion, as everything in you and the world is realigned to the best of your knowledge, affording you the most panoptic sense of perspective you’ll ever achieve, and you kill a fellow taxi driver for a row over pickups. You shoot your brother and your solicitor over family or monetary business, as well as a few others you've had grievances against for anything up to a couple of decades. Then you shoot strangers over nothing, other than what you have projected onto them.

We are being lead towards the conclusion that Derrick Bird, pushed beyond himself by a sense of unfairness, terror of bankruptcy and prison, and the combined stress of these and other matters, decided he couldn’t live any longer. Additionally, he seemingly decided that, in relinquishing life after 52 years of thoughts and experience, he ought to kill others out of spite at his own ultimate predicament, whether or not they had a hand in it. This represents his verdict on life from the culmination of his years.

But then it’s hard to emphasise the resentful spite, (although the Sun has of course managed it) because Derrick Bird meted out the same ‘punishment’ to both his grudge victims and to strangers. He lashed out against the parochial and the arbitrary, an apparent nihilism where he, his brother, his associates and strangers in his line of vision had no advantage in being alive. He let the struggles and arguments of his life tint everything before him as he prepared to end the world from his perspective, and also the worlds of his 12 victims and 11 injured intendeds. His ultimate conclusion on life appears to be: whoever you are, whatever you do (for I don’t know) it isn’t important, it can’t be important - you might as well be dead for all that you were alive.

The conclusion doesn’t fit, though, because the previous afternoon he gave a large sum of money to his son Graeme, ‘for the baby’ [1]. At that point at least he felt that his grandchild and the boy’s parents had potential futures to be invested in, and this was after he had allegedly been planning the next day’s actions.

So I don’t buy any of the whys yet; there have been no good causes offered - certainly not the connecting of a person’s suicide, and murdering of others, with their bills, debt, stress and grief. Those lists of Facts are good for trials and that is all. They are symbols, signifiers of Derrick Bird’s recent life, but offer little of his state of mind, or his ultimate perspective in the final hours of that life. There was something more intense and complicated in his head when he killed those people and himself. Some view of human existence far more potent as an incitement to act, far more complex than money worries and ‘petty’ (petty!) grudges that we’ll never understand. Doubtless Bird himself would not have been able to communicate it, had he been caught mid act.

We shouldn’t trivialise the people that died on Wednesday by imagining that David Bird, Kevin Commons, Darren Rewcastle, Garry Purdham, Jane Robinson, Michael Pike, Kenneth Fishburn, James Jackson, Jennifer Jackson, Susan Hughes, Isaac Dixon and Jamie Clark were killed in settlement of Derrick Bird’s grievances, money worries and stress.

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[1] Cahal Milmo, Mark Hughes and Patrick Hill, ‘The grievances and grudges that drove Derrick Bird over the edge’, The Independent, 4^th June 2010, <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/the-grievances-and-grudges-that-drove-derrick-bird-over-the-edge-1991093.html>.