Pakistan: A country that is a virtual shop

[Clark]

http://www.dawn.com/2011/07/05/a-country-that-is-a-virtual-shop.html

A country that is a virtual shop
By Asha’ar Rehman


‘SHOP’ is a word that fits most hospitals today, but this particular one was brilliant. ‘Another kidney shop unearthed’, a headline last week, said it all about a business that continues in Lahore despite a ban.

The news story indicated the trade has consequently shifted to less visible facilities and even to private houses. Raiding a ‘private residence’ last Friday, the cantonment police found a kidney donor lying not far from the aspiring recipient, a foreigner obviously drawn to the Punjab capital by the promise of a cheap transplant.

The police said the potential donor seemed to be a drug addict. Later, he was made the complainant in a case against four doctors and some assistants; the would-be recipient was shifted to a hospital.

The clinic was located close to the Allama Iqbal International Airport in aid of aspiring foreign kidney recipients flying in mostly from the Middle East. Just how dangerous the clandestine transplant can turn out to be was reflected in an incident in Lahore’s Valencia Town last year in which the police moved into a ‘private residence’ after an Omani recipient died during surgery.

These cases take one back to the 1990s. A four-line news item in an Urdu newspaper reported that robbers had deprived a gentleman from Kot Momin of the money he had received in return for one of his kidneys. This was a lead to be chased and soon a journalist friend set off in the direction of Kot Momin.

It so happened that he landed at a wedding party where men dressed in ceremonial whites sat in rows. Polite inquiries were made to find out if anyone knew about the man who had lost the proceeds from the sale of one of his organs. To his utter shock, the journalist was told he did not need to go looking for the unfortunate robbed man; if he was lucky, he would find kidney-sellers from among the wedding guests.

Lucky the scribe most certainly was and not too long afterwards, a few wedding guests stood up without inhibitions and a few white shirts were lifted to reveal the scars they carried on their bodies. They were only a few representatives from a village which boasted dozens of kidney donors. The trend had caught on after a man from the village sold his kidney to a setup run by one Karnal Sahib in Rawalpindi. It was an epidemic born of bad living conditions.

The picture of five or six scarred men standing in a row sold well, just as it generated quite a lot of sympathy. On the more humanitarian and technical side, it led the curious journalist to the clinic in Rawalpindi. The clinic administration insisted they were saving lives; they saw nothing exploitative in the trade-off.

The argument about saving lives is as strong today. Yet now there is a law that prohibits kidney sale. And then there is this small matter of how the donor gets only a fraction from what the doctors charge the recipients.

Soon after, a couple of clinics specialising in kidney transplantation were discovered in Lahore. I found Arab patients and their Arab attendants prowling all over one such hospital on a visit there in April 2006.

The hospital administration was so keen on accommodating the Arabs that Pakistanis seeking treatment for other ailments found it hard to book a bed – unless they were Pakistanis looking to sell or buy a kidney.

I wandered into one of the wards whose inhabitants bore a strange resemblance to the donors who had been photographed at the Kot Momin wedding many years ago. They appeared to be drugged. Some were lying on beds while some others who were making an effort at walking in the corridors, I learnt, had been relieved of one of their kidneys only a couple of days earlier.

I also learnt that the hospital had made special arrangements for their food. They could obviously be not served what was considered worthy of the rich recipients and I wondered whether back home, they could afford even the tough beef chunks that sat proudly on top of a plateful of rice that reeked of an overdose of what we call Chinese salt.

Those donors had a peculiar smile on their faces, which I have been unable to figure out to this day. But for the upward curl of their moustache, which suggested manly resolve, they were the faces of men who had just been defeated. What I am more certain of is that the hospital that made these poor donors richer by up to Rs200,000 did roaring business, adding as it did storey upon storey to its structure over the following years.

It took story upon story in the media over long years to bring the edifice down. Finally, a law was enacted to ban sale of kidneys. But if anything, what it has done is that it has increased the costs of transplants given the risks the transplant doctors are faced with in the wake of the law.

Rs4m is the going rate according to the police and this is the first time I am hearing that a case may be lodged against a recipient who happens to be an Indonesian. Generally, they enjoy the privileges that are bestowed upon foreigners in this country.

This is a country that has little inclination to review a law that allows a Raymond Davis to buy his freedom and which, instead,
spends so much of its energy on locating and interrogating the needy who had been bought by foreigners. It is a country that has been turned into a shop where lives and organs are bought and sold. Perhaps the best the shopkeepers can do is to impose a general sales tax on renal transactions.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.