Victimised Pakistani doctors flee country over extremism

KARACHI: Pakistan’s doctors, widely targeted by kidnappers, extremists and organised crime, are emigrating in droves for safer, more lucrative positions overseas.

Dr Tipu Sultan said the ransom letter he received last month demanding 5 crore rupees (R6 million) was nothing new in his 38-year career.

“Nearly all of the consulting doctors of all hospitals in this city have received these kind of extortion threats,” the 69-year-old anaesthesiologist said.

“We have received envelopes with bullets inside.”

The threats are not idle. Since 2006, at least 160 Pakistani doctors have been killed, according to the National Dental Medical Council, mostly in Karachi and Quetta, the capital of the south-western province of Balochistan.

“They were shot inside their clinics, at the door of their hospitals, and on the road,” said Sultan.

The motives vary widely, and are not always clear.

Hundreds have been kidnapped and thousands of them have paid extortion money, security and medical officials say. In Balochistan alone, more than 50 doctors and medical professors have been kidnapped since 2008, said the local chapter of the Pakistan Medical Association.

Sultan said he had never paid, but had stepped up his personal security measures, including hiring an armed guard. He does not answer calls from unknown numbers and keeps an irregular schedule to evade ambushes, despite his punctual nature.

“The police have asked me not to be on time, and not to tell anyone what time I will arrive or leave, not even my wife,” he said.

Authorities in the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa have recommended since 2013 that doctors carry guns.

Aside from criminal enterprise, individual doctors also fall foul of the city’s religious or ethnic fault lines between Sunni, Shia and Ahmadi Muslims and minority Hindus or Christians, or between the indigenous Sindhi population and post-partition migrants from India or Pashtuns from the north-west.

“In almost all the cases, no one knows the exact cause,” Sultan said. “But it is mostly due to ransom, religious belief or ethnicity.”

Fayaz Ansari, who survived a 2010 bomb attack at the emergency ward of Karachi’s largest hospital as a medical student, said there was often a political dimension.

The Pakistan Higher Education Commission estimates that about 1 500 doctors leave the country each year. – Sapa-dpa