Polio attacks

There is no respite for polio vaccination teams in the country, along with those that guard them. A security man escorting a team administering polio vaccination drops to children became yet another target when armed men opened fire at him in Chaman, Balochistan. The incident on Oct 27 took place just two days after another policeman guarding a polio vaccination team lost his life when unidentified assailants in Pishin shot him dead on the spot. Afghanistan and Pakistan were the only two remaining countries with polio, then in May this year Mozambique reported a case of polio after remaining polio-free for over three decades since 1992. This has become a cause of concern for the rest of the world too. Health workers administering polio drops in both cities and villages of Pakistan are not safe and somehow the authorities have been unable to chalk out a foolproof security arrangement for these workers and those who are deployed to protect them.

The pattern is the same, some unidentified persons appear from nowhere, mostly on motorcycles, open fire at the guard or the team itself and disappear in no time. The authorities have never been able to arrest a single attacker, what to talk of prosecuting or punishing them. In the latest attack, the victim received a bullet in the head, showing that the fire was shot from a close range. A spokesman for the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for both attacks. After every such attack, local authorities and provincial governments condemn the attack in their usual fashion, and no major change in security arrangement is visible anywhere.

It is an absolutely alarming situation when polio workers or their guards lose their lives in public service and the rest of the country is at ease. Just two months back in August two policemen guarding a polio vaccination team were shot dead by similar ‘unknown’ assailants in the Tank district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The five-day anti-polio campaign that started on Oct 24 was underway in 429 union councils of 19 out of 34 districts of Balochistan. It went smoothly in most districts but not in Chaman and Pishin. Of the 28 cases of polio reported this year around the world, 19 emerged in Pakistan alone; this is two-thirds of the total cases reported. In Balochistan there are five high-risk districts. For these districts the authorities should have made tight arrangements of security but that did not happen and the victims lost their lives that could have been saved with better security. The good news is that unlike KP, no polio case has been reported from any area of Balochistan over the last 18 months.