On Monday, gunmen from the Taliban splinter group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan attacked a polio vaccination team, injuring at least one person in yet another setback to battling Pakistan’s polio epidemic.
The attack, which took place in the Charsadda district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province (KPP), was only the latest episode of violence targeting Pakistan’s vaccination program. On March 1, a roadside-bomb attack on a polio vaccination team convoy killed 11 team members and its security escort. On January 21, unidentified gunmen killed four members of two vaccination teams in Karachi and KPP, and the very next day, unidentified insurgents in Charsadda used an improvised explosive device to kill six policemen assigned to guard the polio vaccination team.
In the first 11 months of 2014, at least 35 vaccinators have been killed.
Pakistan, which accounts for 80 percent of the world’s polio cases in 2014, may become the last country where the polio virus remains endemic and widespread. The tally of reported polio cases in Pakistan this year stands at 262, the highest number in 15 years. A report last month from the Independent Monitoring Board of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative called Pakistan’s polio program a disaster and “a real and present danger to people in neighboring countries and further afield.” The government could no longer blame the anti-polio program’s failure on internal security problems, it said, stating that the government’s could vaccinate its children if it wanted to. The report concluded: “Something big has to change in Pakistan.”
In a small positive step, the government began vaccinations in South Waziristan province two-and-a-half years after the Pakistani Taliban imposed a ban on polio vaccinations. The armed group said they were enforcing the ban because of revelations that the United States Central Intelligence Agency used a vaccination program to try to locate Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden in 2010-2011 and claims that vaccination teams were covertly assisting US drone strikes in the region.
Deliberately attacking health workers, who are civilians protected under international humanitarian law, is a war crime. It’s also a cruel act with far-reaching consequences, particularly for the affected children.
If aid workers can do their important work, this, together with the resumption of vaccinations in South Waziristan, could help consign polio to the epidemiological dustbin of history.
