Despite their noble efforts, aid workers in marginalized countries remain easy targets in political crossfire. It’s easy enough to predict. In most cases, they are volunteers working outside an official system, or for non-profits. Their security is not necessarily bankrolled, nor is their safety prioritized by military interventions in conflict zones.
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| Image Source: trust.org |
In cases where they aren’t victims, they are suspected of being intelligence operatives. Forgood reason. As Katherine Bigelow’s controversial film Zero Dark Thirty reveals, health programs such as community vaccinations are usually set up by First World intelligence agencies to gather information for counter-terrorism missions. The film shows this happening through a polio vaccination program. Fact-checkers for the movie, however, reveal this as a hush-hush tribal infiltration mission in real life through a CIA-sponsored hepatitis B vaccination program in the hunt for bin Laden.
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| Image Source: boingboing.net |
One of the controversial pressures on Bigelow now is the growing distrust for aid workers arising from her movie’s reception in Pakistan. Truth or assertion, the portrayal of aid workers has its reprisals, with Taliban community heads disallowing polio vaccinations or aid workers now marked out as enemies by tribal leaders. The article also reports the murder of six polio vaccinators. Whether they were murdered as war’s collateral damage or on account of the suspicion they incite is another question.
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| Image Source: guardian.co.uk |
Such fate is not unique to aid workers. But for years, the dodgy place is where they get inadvertently thrown. Ironically, it’s no coincidence that conflict-zones need them more.
The efforts of aid workers go hand in hand with the obligation of pharmaceuticals to promote public health. Mary Szela, an immersed representative of this industry, tackles its work through this webpage.
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