Transcript
Hela's capital Tari, and other areas in the province such as Komo and Hides have been riddled by fighting with high-powered weapons in recent weeks.The former mayor of Tari, George Tagobe, says several men were shot dead in the province this week alone, amidst an ongoing payback cycle.He says while this year's election was widely believed to have been rigged in Hela, tribal fighting in the intervening three months is not related.
"The warlords are hunting their enemies, hunting them down. They're driving around and shooting down people, killing people just like nobody's business."
Areas where unrest has flared are often near key infrastructure in ExxonMobil's LNG project. Mr Tagobe says there's significant frustration in the province because the government keeps stalling over paying tens of millions of dollars in project commitments it owes the landowners.
"The government has no money to pay them, I think. So they are just giving them false promises. But I think the people have a riht to ask for their royalties. The government has to pay that."
Several days ago an expatriate worker with the project was kidnapped and held hostage by a disgruntled landowner group in Angore, according to Hela's police commander, Michael Welly.
"There was an expatriate who was taken hostage a couple of days back at the Angore wellpad and he was fortunately released back unharmed the next day after the kidnappers sat down with the company."
Superintendent Welly says Hela's police contingent is limited in its ability to respond to tribal fighting.
"The size of the police in the province has decreased due to the fact that two of my policemen were murdered around late September near Mendi, and obviously all my policemen from Southern Highlands based in Hela had to withdraw in fear of any payback or retaliation."
He said this had cut the Hela police force of around 100 almost in half. But the former Hela governor Francis Potape has criticised police for not doing enough to contain unrest and arrest local warlords who are driving the fighting. Mr Potape says the lack of police manpower is an old excuse which doesn't wash with him, given the recent deployment of defence force personnel to Hela.
"That is more than firepower to move in and start making arrests of people who are fighting on the roads, affecting the landowners and so forth. These recent tribal fights have actually spread to the Hides project area, and on to the Hides gas conditioning plant. So it is affecting Exxon and Oil search workers, and also the general public."
Meanwhile, Exxonmobil has withdrawn non-essential staff from its Hela operations, and also suspended non-essential work while it monitors the security situation in the troubled province.
