PNG police offer reward to try and solve Hela sorcery murder
Content warning: This story discusses violence against women.
Reports of killings in Papua New Guinea (PNG), committed by people claiming their victims were sorcerers, are becoming more and more frequent.
The victims, mostly women, number in the hundreds each year.
There has long been an effort to curb what is known as Sorcery Accusation Relation Violence (SARV), but the practice continues.
RNZ Pacific spoke its RNZ correspondent Scott Waide about the victim in a recent, particularly barbaric murder in Hela Province, in the PNG Highlands.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
SCOTT WAIDE: She is a mother of six, married to a teacher. Her husband was a teacher, and her husband died, and she was accused of sorcery and being responsible for his death. The immediate family of the husband took her and tortured her, as far as I know, over a period of two nights.
She was stripped and burned over that period, and then on the third day, allowed to wear some clothing, and she was taken to a bridge and shot.
Then everything was recorded on video, her torture, the accusations leveled against her. I've just received a translation of the accusations, and it's pretty insane, the level of accusations. So torture over two days and then taken and killed.
DON WISEMAN: So much for relying on relatives to protect you after your husband dies.
SW: Yeah, that's the unfortunate situation of women married into those large families. Because I've spoken to several, you know, several organisations, members of organisations, who deal directly with SARV and that's pretty much the case when their husbands, the husbands of those women, die.
They are the subject of accusations at first and then, if they're very unlucky, torture and eventual death.
DW: Now the Regional Police Commissioner, Joseph Tondop, he seems to be moving quickly on this.
SW: Yes, under Tondop's command, he's seen various instances of Sorcery Accusation Related killings, so he's pretty much fed up with, one, the inaction by the communities themselves, and the difficulty of getting those perpetrators brought to justice.
He has issued orders for the provincial police commander to mobilise resources and go after the killers. Over the last two days, there's been significant development with Commissioner Manning - Police, Commissioner Manning - posting a 50,000 kina reward for information leading to the arrest of those people.
There's also been one arrest, and in particular, a close relative of the woman being arrested as well, and his identity brought to the police as well. So there's been significant progress since that incident.
DW: And they have available, of course, a video.
SW: Yes, it is, you know, quite disturbing that with social media now, a lot of that brutality is recorded and posted without any thought of the impact it's going to have on the wider community.
Sometimes I'm thinking, the communities want to outdo themselves by posting videos of the accusations and the tortures. Yeah, pretty brutal video, this one.
DW: Mr Tondop wants to see a wider police action to combat SARV across the country. He wants a national strategy. Is that likely? Is that going to happen?
SW: There are various organisations working towards a national strategy. But you know, the the communities and the accusations and how the communities respond to SARV is varied. You know, very, very different in different communities and in the Highlands, and in particular, there are similarities,
A lot of the community based organisations, church based organisations have developed their own systems to deal with SARV, for instance, in Enga, where the UN has put an enormous amount of resources.
I just spoke to a UN official who said they can't put safe houses in Enga because the safe houses will be attacked. The victims of sorcery violence are brought out of Enga and placed in other provinces where there are safe houses.
So, the systems are varied. There needs to be a strategy, as Tondop said, on a national scale, but it is a complex area to work within, and a lot of times the police and government officials rely on community based organisations and individuals who bravely go out and rescue these women.
DW: Are incidents of SARV becoming more common? Or are they now, because of the wider availability of media, just being reported?
SW: I think they are becoming a lot more prevalent. I was just speaking with a church health worker based in Hela, and he was saying that in the last six months, there's been instances every month that he has heard or seen, particularly outside of Tari itself.
It is becoming prevalent, and I think the other factor is that people are reporting it more, and there is a lot more awareness in the community.
These incidents are being reported to police or to the churches or to community based organisations in the hope that it'll be stopped or help will be brought to them.
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PAUL BARKER: We're certainly having law and order problems that have in the past tended to be restricted to certain provinces and locations seem to have extended to additional provinces that were hitherto relatively peaceful, including East New Britain and other places in the islands. But also, not just in the islands - through down to other coastal provinces, Madang and so on, and as you've seen, conflicts that have broken out in the streets of Moresby. To some extent it relates to a lack of economic opportunities, frustration by young people, particularly; on the other hand it's also weak capacity for application of the rule of law, not just by the police, but by communities and cooperation between the different parties. During this year, a major focus of the 2025 budget has been on enhancing police capacity. And that was a bit of a wake up call from the riots in January of last year. They have got extra police that they've recruited and that are in training. 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As highlighted in the media just lately, it seems that always, the police don't have a vehicle or don't have any fuel for their vehicle at the critical time when you've got to go and intervene to rescue someone. The whole system of community engagement, the churches are some of the most effective at working on the ground, along with some of these other entities, human rights defenders and so on. But we do need this strong government, civil society. The answer is not the Terrorism Act, which was rushed through just recently, and which risks making the situation worse by casting everyone, including, school kids, as terrorists just because they may be young and wandering the streets or traveling. We need to have, instead of that antipathy and effectively, an autocratic approach, we need to establish our systems of community dialogue, and we need the leaders to be engaged and participating, not all remote, overseas, travelling or in their Land Cruisers somewhere else. 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You've also got some of the other trades; the drugs trade and some of the other trades, but it's this melding of power, money, even the sorcery accusation related violence. It's a new form of power, intimidating people and making yourself powerful and everyone being compliant with you. So we've got to break those systems, and that requires cooperation. DW: Under the Terrorism Act, that's the lethal force allowance? PB: Yeah, that means you can go out and shoot anyone who happens to be inconvenient to you, and obviously that can open the Pandora's box. You can shoot political enemies, people who are critics, journalists, anyone else and it's certainly not what PNG needs. DW: What you're talking about here, it's something of a revolution that would take a huge amount to achieve, wouldn't it? Do you think there is the wherewithal within the country to do it, to achieve it? PB: I think it's going to need a lot of international assistance, but it's going to have to be ideas,the commitment are going to have to come from within the country, so the outside world can support, in training, in dispute resolution, training for not just police, but for community leaders. We need that commitment. There are certainly people who are seeing some of these issues, are seeing this is needed, and I think it's part of the dialog we have this 50 year review that's going on looking forward 20 years, 'How do we move forward and avoid many of the mistakes of the past'? So that review team is raising many of those issues. A committee chaired by former deputy prime minister, Charles Abel, so they're trying to think outside the box and see where we can go forward. But all across the board, if you look at the statistics just lately, which have been put together in the latest economic and social reports from the ADB, from the World Bank and others, you'll see absolutely atrocious social indicators. You see the economy growing slowly. You're seeing education capacity not growing. You get a lot of these functions, high malnutrition, low job creation, and so on and so forth. We've got to address those together with the impacts of that, which is growing frustration and conflict developing in the urban areas where people have re-migrated. The development partners, some of them, are aware of this, and they're throwing their hands a little bit in the air and saying, 'what do we do'? And academics are sort of doing that as well, and saying, 'Hey, look, you know, the only way is cooperation, working with those who are willing and able to provide leadership and think outside the box'.
