Transcript
Reports have emerged from Jiwaka province of a Lutheran Pastor's assistant being buried alive for allegedly using sorcery. Koip village where this took place, in middle Jimi district, is very remote, according to District Administrator Matthew Kuraiwae.
"Geographically, it's very difficult. Jimi is very remote and some of the villages, you cannot reach by vehicles or even planes into the area. it's just by walking. It's very difficult for us to cover so many things at one time with then financial situation the government is going through. Jimi is one of those very remote districts of PNG."
A Highlands-based maternal health and education activist with the NGO PNG Tribal Foundation, Ruth Kissam visited the village where this attack took place. She learnt that the perpetrator has been cutting off hands of elderly people and terrorising the community. The chronically under-resourced provincial police force is barely able to reach the village and needs community help to bring in the suspect. Ms Kissam says in some parts of the Highlands police have begun to take out orders against village councillors.
"Anyone that starts off a fight in the village, or rape or kill, they (police) take in the councillor or the magistrate, and they face six months in jail if they don't give up the men. So then the pressure mounts on the person to hand himself in and they do that. So if the community and the police can work together to have some form of understanding between them, then they will be able to bring police into the comity and have the suspect arrested."
Churches have been working to change people's minds about sorcery. But the head of PNG's Evangelical Lutheran Church says sorcery-related killings seem to be worsening. Bishop Jack Urame says areas where these attacks tend to take place usually lack basic infrastructure, health and education facilities.
"A lot of people are accused because their life pattern is changing, there is social pressure and lack of development. The lifestyle diseases are increasing and people are dying all of a sudden, and so people continue to resort to their traditional beliefs to give explanations to why people continue to suffer from sickness and disease. And so the mindset has not changed very much and therefore people continue to blame people and accuse people."
PNG's traditional society has undergone rapid change in the last several decades. Ruth Kissam says this transition has caused great upheaval for many Papua New Guineans who, in an effort to negotiate this, sometimes resort to subverting cultural norms.
"Right now, I'm going out to Wabag, on a case that we're trying to prosecute someone that actually ordered the torture of his own Mum because he felt ashamed as an educated person that everyone kept saying that his mother was a witch. So he's taken that out on his own mother. So these kind of things are happening even to educated people. So it's a phenomenon that even I can't be abel to explain right now, but it's all probably due to the fact that the transition is in a very short space of time."
She says development, especially access to education and health, is pivotal to changing people's mindsets. But with national and provincial governments strapped for cash, no one is holding their breath.