Witch hunts, murder and evil in Papua New Guinea
A tide of torture and killing of innocent women linked to 'sorcery' and the 'dark arts' is overwhelming the nation's police. Ramita Navai, in Port Moresby, reports
Nearly all the residents of Koge watched as Julianna Gene and Kopaku Konia were dragged from their homes, to be hung from trees and tortured for several hours with bush knives. No one came forward to help. In the eyes of the villagers, the women were witches. They deserved to die.
"They used their powers to bewitch a man to death," said Kingsley Sinemane, a community leader. "We had to get rid of them, as they could have killed others. We had to protect our village."
The finger of suspicion fell on the women after a local man died in a car accident. The only sign now of the horror that unfolded in this remote Papua New Guinea village is a black, charred clearing where some dozen homes once stood. Fear of the supernatural and the stigma of being branded a witch is so great that around 30 of the victims' relatives were chased out of the village. Upturned shoes and a few bundles of clothes are all that remain of their former lives. Most of them had nowhere to flee to, as word had spread they were related to so-called witches. They are now forced to live in slums in the nearest town.
A shocking increase in witch-hunt deaths in Papua New Guinea has prompted the government to launch a parliamentary commission of inquiry with a view to toughening the law. Joe Mek Teine, the chairman of the nation's law reform commission, has publicly declared that sorcery killings are "getting out of hand". Most witch hunts happen in the Highlands, the remote mountainous interior wracked by centuries of tribal wars and blood feuds. Contact with the outside world was only established in the 1930s, when some of the many ethnic groups were still living stone-age existences. Although there are no official statistics on sorcery killings, more than 50 were reported to the police in just two Highland provinces last year.
The homicide squad at Kundiawa police station in Simbu, a steep, rugged province believed to be the epicentre of the witch hunts, is struggling to cope with the surge in murders. Detective Inspector Blacky Koglame estimates there are up to 20 killings a month in this area alone, most of which are not reported. Witchcraft is a secretive and taboo subject, so people are often too scared to come forward.
A worrying new development is that the crime, which has historically been a rural phenomenon, is now spreading to urban areas as families are driven out of villages by poverty and tribal fighting, and into towns and cities. Mount Hagen, the largest city in the Highlands, has recently been rocked by a wave of witch killings, and there have even been cases reported in the capital, Port Moresby.
Belief in black magic is so ingrained that the government legally recognises sorcery, under the 1976 Sorcery Act. It permits white magic (healing or fertility rites for example) but the so-called black arts are punishable by up to two years in jail. This has resulted in murderers alleging the use of black magic as provocation and securing reduced sentences.
Branding someone a witch is a crime, but Detective Koglame estimates that fewer than 1 per cent of cases end up in court. Even when witnesses do come forward, he admits the police simply do not have the resources to investigate.
"Sometimes we have to borrow pens and paper from complainants in order to file our reports, and we can't always get to crime scenes as we don't have enough petrol money for the police cars," Det Koglame said. "And anyway, arresting people is very hard. Everyone in the community is usually involved, so you can't just go in looking for suspects, as you'd have to arrest the whole village, and that's impossible."
Those accused of sorcery are sometimes tried in local kangaroo courts, with tribesmen and village councils handing out death sentences. The killings are mostly committed by groups of men who first torture so-called witches to make them "confess" to their crimes and force them to name other "witches". Some villages even have groups of vigilante killers who will strike as soon as a suspect is named.
In one area deep in the Highlands a team of eight "witch hunters" claim to have tortured and killed 18 people between them. "Mostly a witch hunter just collects information from any village where there is a problem, and then we go in and collect those people who are suspected of being witches," said the leader of the group, a man with a reputation as a violent local gangster who refused to be named. "It is part of my culture, my tradition, it's my belief. I see myself as a guardian angel. We feel that we kill on good grounds and we're working for the good of the people in the village," he said. Witch hunts nearly always occur after a death or an illness of a community member. "Natural causes for death or illness are just not accepted," said Pastor Jack Urame, a researcher at the Melanesian Institute and one of the country's leading experts on sorcery killings. "So whenever someone dies in a village, a person must blamed," he said. According to Mr Urame the victims are typically older women or women on their own, who have no extended family to defend them. Witch hunts can also be used as a pretext to settle scores or land disputes he said.
Umame Gamano survived a witch hunt after she was accused of causing her husband's death. One of her daughters helped her to escape a baying mob armed with bush knives after she had been hauled before a community gathering at which villagers urged her to confess to being a witch. Ms Umame fled the village, leaving her children behind and has not seen them since the attack that happened over a year ago. Her attackers were her own relatives and have threatened to kill her children if they visit her.
"I don't know why they think I'm a witch and I don't understand why they think I killed my husband," she said. "I loved him so much."
Unreported World: Bush Knives and Black Magic, Channel 4, tonight, 7.35pm
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Comments
Point being that this is a ever-present and all-too-common - irrespective of the civilized/uncivilized framework that determines this reading, and that should be enough to warrant these crimes as the occur, in New York, Moscow, Johannesburg, Mexico City, Sydney, Mumbai, Spokane, Cambridge.....
Ian Thomlinson? Not worth mentioning really- I mean there are countless people dying of AIDS in Africa so what does a newspaper seller's death really matter?
Fred West managed what? 11 kids? That's a mere blip on the teenage mortality rate, so why all the fuss?
And you're right about Cambridge - last time I went there, the stench of rotting flesh from the old ladies hanging from the trees in the town centre put me right in mind of the PNG witch trials.
I guess the bottom line is they aren't hurting you, so screw em, right?
Unreported World: Bush Knives and Black Magic, Channel 4, tonight, 7.35pm - the whole point of this series surely is that they're not stories that usually hit the headlines.
I don't quite understand how the poor women of Cambridge being raped in military actions come into it... but you're right I haven't read that story anywhere ;o)
The situation in PNG is very delicate. These people have a right to govern themselves and follow their traditions to keep their culture s alive. On the other hand, there should be a powerful state machinery with a police force dislocated in remote villages with the power to end these barbaric murders. The village chief can govern and make key decision in the village but could not have the right to imprison/murder or inflict torture on other members of the community. But again these places are really remote and very difficult to control centrally from Port Moresby.
How the hell did Islam come up in this discussion.
Ive noticed nooraza do this before and it looks like He/she is trying to spread hatred amongst us so ignore her /him
for the record I am Christian
First of all 'witchcraft' is not how I expect people in PNG refer to the use of white or black magic. Both witchcraft and sorcery are English words with a distinctive history of use, and come heavily load with socio-cultural meaning, most of which are negative unfortunately due to the enlightened Christian inquistion. I suspect that both terms came into use in PNG when colonialist attempted to supress local culture and repress the most socially important individuals in the land namely 'witchdoctors' who were often custodians of local religious beliefs, providers of health care, conveened leagal matters, and legitimised the leaders of the land.
Second, these are not beliefs in the supernatural. Supernatural is a 'Western' term which implies something outside of natural phenomena. Just as God is not 'supernatural' to followers of organised religion, 'witches' and 'magic' operate within a distinctive epistemology that is based on a worldview very different from 'Western' ideas. The worldview in PNG, like that in the majority of other countries, most likely holds that there are powers that exist in the world that are not visible or accessible to everyone. So called 'witchdoctors' are often the people who can transgress our physical world into the invisible world and utilise this unknown power and utilise it for both, culturally defined, 'good' and 'bad' purpose. These powers are thus natural within this worldview.
However, I suppose the view I have discussed is not as exciting to the majority of people!
With that said the other side of this story is very important, the hunting, torture and killing of woman. This is an atrocious act in any culture or religion. There is nothing that can excuse this behaviour. I do not care what belief system you hold....Killing is killing.
Rituals that are unique to specific cultures are often interpreted as violent to our societies usually religiously influenced social mores and norms. They simply go beyond what would be considered socially normal in our society but are, in fact, nonviolent. Take, for instance, the ritualized endocannibalism practiced by the Fore Tribespeople also of the Eastern Papua Highlands not so far from this area, in which relatives consumed the deceased to return the "life force" of the deceased to his hamlet. That is in fact nonviolent behavior but is viewed with abject disgust and horrid trepidation in Western society, going directly against most strict religious morales. It was outlawed when discovered in the 1950's, mainly on the basis that it contributed to the spreading of kuru disease, the only known infectious human prion. Dr. Gajdusek was awarded the Nobel Prize in '76 for demonstrating kuru was transmissable between in chimpanzees.
My comment wont be a long one. I agree with the viewpoint regarding the western influence on PNG
associated with the colonial missionnaries labeling the cultural practices of these tribes, wiping out
completely their cultural identity in the name of religion, bringing all kind of vices and sickness that
these wonderful cultures didn't have before in the name of civilization.
You men Dracula or let me call him Count Dracula wakes u again and see the priest to remove the devil or tries the Exorcisms. In Tanzania there are many like them under the trees in the night. They sit and invite the ghosts. You do not se them but they see you. That is what the medicine men or Mullahs tells you. Your gown is caught up in the thorn and you think the ghost is holding you. You scream. The priest or the devil comes cuts the gown little, you are saved, thank him and pay him a goat.
But that a trick no? Yes? Mama, look, they are playing my song.
I thank you
Firozali A. Mulla
However, to cast aside the West's colonial legacy as something that we "don't do" anymore is disingenuous. The body count from from that history [aside from the environmental havoc] is astounding. That project was driven by a host of economic, political, and narcissistic interests, but it was rationalized by the narrative that we were to embark upon the civilization of "primitives".
Where the "dark people from dark regions" angle dropped from this article, how would the article be received? It would remain the horrific troubling situation that it is now, but instead of making is easier to dismiss this as part and parcel of a culture that is clearly "stone-age", indigenously corrupt and violent, the implications could not be safely barricaded by our cultural categories.
This is another disturbing example of male violence against women perpetrated with virtual impunity - and that phenomena cuts across the divisions implied by the colonial caricature that this article employs.
When lack of conceptualisations and ignorance causes their tribal systems to disintegrate......
Stone Age man learns about evil from the missionaries, as prior to that there was no evil in existence. Just, Spirits, Life, Death and Chomping your enemies.
Murders occur IN EVERY COUNTRY; and each country is expected to handle domestic murders.
In making this New Guinea alleged murders seem an international concern, the Western media morons and propagandists are, as usual, diverting attention from the fact that Europeans have been the biggest international mass murderers for centuries now!
The European killings and torture of the INNOCENT of Iraq and elsewhere should be the topic of discussion; because such European barbarism is no 'ordinary' national murders.
How much crap can one man's brain contain.... in case 2patriotic it seem he is a real Shiite for brains, and it is funny, Most of the killings in Iraq are done by Shiite for brain Suicide Bombers without a Sunni disposition, And yes the Invasion of Iraq was at best a total lie, but hey good old Saddam did his best to set the precedence by killing a million of his own people,and not forgetting all the Shiite, and Sunni killings of each other,
So bringing in this Anti Gay European vs Iraq B.s.tting is just laughable, goes to show the lack of intelligence and comprehension that exists in this persons pathetic excuse for a brain. It seems to me you still believe the earth is flat and the moon is made of cheese, i suggest you study harder, learn geography and change your name from 2patriot to 2pathetic for words, prahahahahahahahahaha who's the closet homosexual now .
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