There are more cases of polio in Balochistan than there are in Somalia and this is when that country has suffered an outbreak of the disease this year while it doesn't have a government.
It seems Balochistan does not either; at least not the sort that can protect its people, particularly its polio workers.
If further proof of this was needed, Wednesday provided it: a team of polio workers was attacked by gunmen who accosted the van they were traveling in. The crime; doing the thankless, dangerous work of weaving through the country’s narrow lanes and suffering suburbs to inoculate its millions against a disease that cripples and kills.
For this, four were killed, bringing the total of dead polio workers to 65 since the first targeted attack in December 2012.
Almost no one came to their aid even after the attack. When the team leader, bleeding and injured, managed to jump off the vehicle screaming for help for her dead and dying colleagues, her cries went unheard.
“I screamed to a policeman for help but he just walked away,” she told reporters later.
By the time a passing motorcyclist finally heard her pleas, four of her seven member team already lay dead. Citizens who died in the service of an apathetic nation; undeserving of their sacrifice, unfeeling for their loss.
Pakistan is a world leader in polio cases now. It has more of them than both Afghanistan and Nigeria, the two other countries where the disease is still active. Pakistanis, already unwelcome beyond their borders, are likely to see increasing repercussions of this.
The militant project against polio is simple; kill the vaccinators, prevent the vaccinations and transform Pakistan into the isolated petri dish of the pestilence, disconnected from the rest of the world by its vulnerability to plague.
Pakistan’s alienated millions, welcome nowhere else, will all fall happily into the darkness of militancy, the violence of extremism, making up murderous mobs that lynch and stone and bomb and kill. The slide is already visible; bloody and palpable.
In the details of Pakistan’s polio debacle there is enough blame to taint everyone.
The international community has pumped millions into the latest polio vaccination campaign underway in Waziristan and Balochistan. However, it remains stubbornly uninterested in for example, sponsoring a resolution at the United Nations censuring the United States for using the cover of a polio vaccination program to collect DNA for their operation to capture Osama bin Laden. That connection, which continues to whet conspiracy theories about the contamination of the vaccine and foment Pakistan’s public health crisis is intentionally ignored.
In this flawed global narrative, polio is Pakistan’s problem for only Pakistan to solve, the donated millions simply an example of global magnanimity against Pakistan’s plagued ineptitude, its militant scourge and its paranoid population.
Polio workers have administered nearly 450 million doses of vaccine to Pakistan’s children in the last two years, since the first polio worker was killed. They have done so without protection; traveling in rickety vans, armed only with the white boxes in which they carry the drops through darkened doorways and squalid dwellings.
Pakistanis know protection is possible for some; they have seen it made available in convoys of bulletproof cars, and the comforting cocoons of gun toting armed guards that follow this or that official around the country. Pakistan belongs to these protected people, pandering politicians and their progeny whose lives are considered worthy of such expenditures by the state.
For the rest of the country, the polio workers and the polio sufferers past, present and future there is no hope of reprieve, no protection from either paranoia or pandemic; just a perpetual listing of the brave and the dead.
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