VICE (2013) s04e12 Episode Script

1 This week on "Vice": the race to wipe out polio in Pakistan.
(cries) (speaking foreign language) (siren blaring) Just a year ago, one of the vaccinators was assassinated in this neighborhood for doing this work.
And then, the lingering terror of war in Southeast Asia.
(explosion) (metal detector whines) The Vietnam war left millions of unexploded ordnance in the ground.
(speaking foreign language) (theme music playing) Crowd (chanting): Hands up! Don't shoot! Hands up! The development of a polio vaccine was one of the greatest successes of modern medicine.
New infections fell from hundreds of thousands per year to almost zero.
But in Pakistan in recent years, the disease has actually spiked.
So we went to Karachi to find out why.
(speaking foreign language) Ben Anderson: Vaccinating against polio is incredibly simple.
(speaking foreign language) Each kid is getting two drops.
How many times do they have to get that before they're vaccinated? Anderson: And that's all it takes, a few drops in a child's mouth several times.
Polio is a highly contagious disease that spreads through contact with infected human feces.
In countries like Pakistan where almost 70 million people don't have access to adequate sanitation, it can run rampant.
The virus affects thousands of people here.
In acute cases, it can cause permanent paralysis, often affecting the legs and spine.
Almost every other country on Earth has eradicated the disease.
Nigeria was declared polio-free last year, and Afghanistan is very close.
Pakistan had the most new cases by far in 2015.
The reason for this is that some families refuse the vaccine often believing in conspiracy theories about it being a foreign plot to harm Muslims.
Throughout Pakistan, an army of female health workers goes door to door, trying to make sure every child is safe.
(speaks foreign language) (woman speaks) Anderson: It's a job that only women can do, because in the more conservative areas only they are allowed into families' homes.
The vaccinators have been here.
You can see their chalk markings.
(Abida speaks) (woman speaks) (Abida speaks) Anderson: So the next house we're going to is a house where apparently the family have said no to taking the vaccine in the past.
(Abida speaks) (man speaking) What do you think their plan is? But you've seen no evidence that this is funded by Israel and no evidence that this is going to make people impotent.
Anderson: But you believe that these women, who've dedicated their lives to vaccinating children, are agents of Israel? What's your reaction to that? Anderson: We spoke to Haji Saddar Khan, who lives in an area where several families have refused drops.
When did she first start getting ill? When the vaccination teams came to this house, did your family allow her to get the drops into her mouth? So her grandfather has somehow been given the impression that she's going to make a full recovery.
I think what's going to happen is her central nervous system is going to stop sending the right messages to her muscles and her muscles are going to start wasting away.
The local vaccination teams have said that this house used to be a refusal house so maybe someone in this family refused to let her get her drops.
We followed the family to Karachi's biggest children's hospital to see a doctor who could confirm whether or not the little girl had polio.
(Dr.
Raza speaks) (crying) (Khan speaks) (Dr.
Raza speaks) (Khan speaks) (speaks) (speaks) (speaks) (speaks) (speaking) There are actually a number of reasons why people refuse vaccination.
The first reason is that there is some myth of making people infertile by giving these kinds of vaccinations.
And then there was this issue about Osama Bin Laden getting caught and somehow that was linked to the whole polio campaign.
The United States is acknowledging that a doctor held in Pakistan on suspicion of treason was working for the CIA to find Osama Bin Laden.
Anderson: Dr.
Shakil Afridi, posing as a vaccinator, obtained DNA samples confirming Bin Laden's identity.
He is currently serving a 33-year prison sentence in Pakistan.
(man praying over PA) Anderson: To find out what affect the Bin Laden raid had, we went to one of Pakistan's largest madrassas, Jamia Binoria.
(praying) There we met with Mufti Naeem, one of the country's most influential Islamic scholars.
(Mufti Naeem speaks) After the Bin Laden raid, when the CIA had used a hepatitis vaccinator to verify he was living in that compound, did more people believe that the polio vaccine was actually harmful to them? Anderson: Statements like these have consequences.
Since 2012, more than 80 polio workers and their security have been murdered for doing this job.
So this is the neighborhood militant center.
There's a serious amount of security here-- dozens of heavily armed policemen.
Seems insane that they should need this much security for such a such a noble job.
The entire police force for this area and some army rangers are dedicated to their security.
But what do you think about the fact that you need this much security? Just two days later, a suicide bomber attacked another polio vaccination center killing 15 people.
In January of 2014, close to a dozen gunmen on motorbikes attacked a polio team in Karachi, killing three vaccinators.
Salma Jaffar was lucky to survive.
Do you know if they specifically came after you and targeted you and your colleagues? Would you go back to doing the same work again? Anderson: Asmat Ara was attacked in 2015, when five men broke into her house in the middle of the night.
Did they say anything throughout the attack that made you think it was because of your work as a polio vaccinator? Do you want to go back to your work, giving the polio vaccine to children? (crying softly) Despite these attacks, exceptionally brave women keep going out and knocking on doors.
(Khalida Nasreer speaking) This is Orangi, a Pashtun neighborhood in Karachi, which historically has had lots of resistance to the vaccinators.
Just a year ago, one of them was assassinated in this neighborhood for doing this work.
Immediately after the attack, what effect did it have on you and your team? (siren blaring) Anderson: Khalida is just incredible.
To see a woman taking as much of a leading role as she is, and arguing back against people who refuse the vaccine-- men-- and bombing around on a quad bike is unheard of in this area.
(Khalida speaking) Does this make you think you can convince everybody? Khalida and her colleagues have turned things around, and they are now close to winning the war against polio.
(speaking English) Anderson: Dr.
Elias Durry has been instrumental in the global fight to eradicate polio for the last two decades.
(Durry speaking) (kids laugh) Earlier this season, we looked at the devastating effects that American-made cluster bombs were having on the civilian populations in Yemen.
(crying) But we wanted to take a look at the larger picture of unexploded munitions in other parts of the world.
so we went to Southeast Asia, where millions of these controversial weapons are still taking lives, every day.
I just crossed the Thai-Burmese border.
I'm in Karen State.
I'm embedded with the KNLA-- that's the Karen National Liberation Army.
These rebels are locked in a decades-long civil war with the Burmese government.
Both sides have used one of the most primitive but deadly kinds of indiscriminate weapons: land mines.
I asked the soldiers about land mines, and they produced this.
This is a homemade land mine that they carry with them.
This little wooden part acts as a pressure plate.
When somebody steps on it, this thing goes boom.
But the problem with these homemade weapons and the military-grade explosives that the Burmese government is planting, is that it's often the civilian population who sees their impact.
In nearby villages, we met some of these civilian victims.
(speaking foreign language) These weapons are often used in areas where the local people lack the proper resources to treat their condition.
So for victims in Burma, that often means traveling to neighboring Thailand just to get help.
Ma Mya Win was 18 when she triggered a land mine.
The Hpa-an Clinic has provided physical therapy to hundreds of land mine victims in the last decade.
Many of them show up with crude, makeshift prosthetics that they've constructed on their own.
These are homemade prosthetics? (speaks English) And this is just a rod and-- and a ball bearing.
Crazy.
These limbs are in constant demand, because, as Dr.
Yeshua Moser explained to us, the threat from unexploded ordnance can last for decades after a conflict is over.
Anti-personnel mines aren't something that spoils like milk.
Because of the extraordinary number of civilians that were injured and killed by these things in peacetime, it's what we call a weapon of mass destruction in slow motion.
That brings us to Burma's neighbor.
Right next door, you have Laos.
Slightly different problem, but still a very deadly problem, right? Yes.
In Laos you have much more of a cluster-munition problem due to the aerial bombing they experienced during the war.
Larsen: That war was the Vietnam War, and the country dropping those deadly weapons was the United States.
In an effort to halt enemy supply lines that ran through Laos, the US began carpet bombing this small country using a highly controversial weapon known as a cluster bomb, which breaks apart in mid-air into dozens of smaller explosives.
The problem is, not all of these bomblets actually explode, essentially making them land mines dropped from the sky.
I'm in Savannakhet Province, Laos.
This area is one of the most heavily bombed regions in the world.
During the Vietnam War, the US dropped more ordnance on this teeny country than they did on all of the Axis powers in World War II.
This has left millions of unexploded ordnance in the ground here in Laos.
Nick Torbet: Yesterday, there was an accident in a bow, a local person blew off his hand.
Larsen: Nick Torbet runs the Laos branch of HALO, an organization that has cleared tens of thousands of explosives in Laos.
He explained to us how cluster munitions work.
A cluster munition is designed to explode on impact, so it's designed like an artillery shell or bomb-- it's to hit the ground, go bang.
But a fairly large number didn't explode.
The BLU-26, they were dropped in containers containing hundreds of these in an individual bomb that would break up in the sky and hundreds of these would fall towards the ground, spinning in the air, and then impact on landing.
You can see the small little ball bearings within it, and the idea is these ball bearings spread out and become a fragmentation designed to kill people.
Is there a render-safe procedure for these? No, for cluster ammunitions, you can't really render them safe.
You can use, you know, explosive effects to make them explode in a less violent way.
Larsen: Nick took us out on one of his group's missions to the remote village of Nahuanam.
For more than 40 years, Nahuanam has dealt with the leftover cluster munitions surrounding their village.
HALO actually has to set up a base camp from which to operate.
They've done that in this village.
This tent behind us is where they'll live for the next three weeks.
But before we could even begin our search, a local elder pointed us to an armed American bomblet, which was just a few hundred feet from camp.
He's leading us to where he thinks he found it right now.
How did you find this? (man speaks) Do you know people who have been hurt by these before? (man speaking) Larsen: We watched as HALO prepared a safe detonation procedure for this unexploded ordnance just paces from the village.
So basically what's happening now is, as you can see, there's farmers, there's villagers, there's a village right over there.
So Davondan is spreading his team out, deploying them, to warn off people that there's about to be an explosion.
(technicians speak on radio) Larsen: This container has the blasting caps in them.
Once he takes that blasting cap and he puts it right into the top of this explosive, it's placed down in the hole and explodes that bomb, hopefully in a safe manner.
(technician speaks on radio) (speaking) There's nothing left of it except for these little ball bearings, which are actually still hot from the explosion.
These are what are designed to shred flesh, right here.
(electronic whining) Where one bomblet is found, there's almost always more nearby, so the team has to search the entire area.
Their job is to map contamination.
The team leader, Bandra, set out a small 50-by-50 meter box, and they all work in towards the center, doing a sweep of the area.
(whines) (speaks) Oh, there's another one? It's the same type of munition, another BLU-26.
Here's another one.
(Bandra speaks) Larsen: And it isn't just cluster bombs.
The area is littered with unexploded ordnance of all types.
And these hidden bombs are so pervasive that a new generation has had to learn to spot them.
They're leading us to it right now.
Oh yeah, there it is right there.
Do you know where these came from? This is why explosives like land mines and cluster munitions are so dangerous-- because decades after a conflict ends, the original victims, as well as their children and grandchildren are still paying a price.
(speaking foreign language) Even though HALO is working constantly to neutralize these bombs, there are still millions more.
And there will continue to be millions more to neutralize around the world because American-made cluster munitions are still being dropped today.
Despite international calls to stop using these weapons, the US has used them in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and has armed Saudi Arabia with the bombs it's used on highly populated areas in Yemen.
For more than two decades, Senator Patrick Leahy has crusaded against the use of these indiscriminate explosives.
You buy these for $3 or $4.
This much pressure would have taken my arm and, in this case, most of my head off.
Larsen: Senator Leahy told us the US needs to take a leadership role in banning these weapons.
If we're not willing to give up these things isn't it easier for a country that has nowhere near our power to say, "Wait a minute.
The most powerful nation on Earth won't do it, why should we?" We have some in the Pentagon who think that you should never limit any weapon.
There are those, after World War I, that said, "Well, maybe we shouldn't ban poison gas.
We might need it at some point.
" No.
It's a human rights need to get rid of it, and we didn't need it.
The war is over.
Land mines are still there.
How many generations are going to continue to die because they were used?