Learning from the past: Polio workers blame police for ‘negligence’

Health secretary suspends last day of campaign today.

KARACHI: The victims of the polio attacks in Karachi blame the law enforcers for failing to protect their colleagues, The Express Tribune has learnt.

The attack on Tuesday was the eighth attack on health teams working in the anti-polio campaign in the city. A similar deadly attack took place in December 2012, when three teams in different parts of the city were targeted on the same day.

“This was our fault,” sobbed a colleague of one of the victims of Tuesday’s attack. “When they (the police) have failed to protect themselves, how could we have expected them to protect us,” he said. “They promised us that they will send the police force after 11am.” Despite the lack of security given to the workers, the police are unwilling to own up to a failure on their part. “We were asked to stay with the workers in Bilal Colony and Mehran Town,” a police officer requesting anonymity told The Express Tribune. “This is not our fault.”

The police also suggested that the polio workers faced the tragedy because they did not follow standard operating procedures. “We asked them to go there for the campaign after 11am but they did not follow our directions,” said district East DIG Munir Shaikh, while talking to The Express Tribune.

“There is a history of attacks on polio workers in Karachi. If we look at it, we can see that the police have managed to foil a few attacks while at  times the militants have succeeded. Maybe, if they had followed procedure, this would not have happened.”

Target, teams and security

The Sindh heath secretary, Iqbal Hussain Durrani, announced that they have suspended the third and last day of the polio campaign. The deputy commissioners of all districts will give a new plan today to continue the campaign.

The three-day polio campaign started on January 20 and was supposed to cover 165 out of 188 union councils (UC) in Karachi. The government had planned to launch the second phase of the polio drive in more sensitive areas, such as Gadap Town’s UC-4, Baldia Town and Landhi, parts of Hijrat Colony and Keamari Town, and two UCs in Lyari. Korangi was not declared a sensitive area earlier.

Around 18,500 polio teams were assigned to complete the task across the province, including nearly 6,000 teams in Karachi alone. Each team had two members — mostly two female workers as people relied on them more. For the 30 teams in Qayyumabad, only 12 security personnel were deployed but the residents claimed they did not see a single policeman in the area with the polio teams.

According to statistics available with Unicef, at least 91 cases of polio were detected in Pakistan in 2013. Of these, nine were reported in Sindh — seven in Karachi and one each in Dadu and Kashmore. At least four new polio cases have been confirmed in Pakistan this year.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 22^nd, 2014.