Transcript
JELTA WONG: It's not in our history..... To burn people or stone them for sorcery. This type of sorcery has become very violent. We've put a task force together to investigate and to find out how these people are coming into this type of cult-related sorcery. In the last year or so it's accelerated so much, we've found that there's an outside influence. And most of our people in the villages are not as educated as we'd like them to be, but they seem to follow the trend of information coming in, it's become a big hassle. Like every little thing now: even if it's a proven disease, it takes just one person to get up and say 'she mentioned this guy's name' and they take it out of context; and you've got a whole group of people chasing around one person. We're trying to get to the bottom of it.
JOHNNY BLADES: It's difficult out there in the remote parts though, isn't it, because it's hard to confront a village and police are often outnumbered, and communities close ranks. Does the government need to give the police force more resourcing, more ability to bring these people who do heinous crimes to justice?
JW: Yeah absolutely correct. We always look at the funding for these type of things, but the real issue is that our own people need to be educated. As a government we need to put programmes in place where you can go out to the villages and sit with them and explain to them that it's not sorcery, it's health issues, and you can’t just blame... people are... it's really hard you know. We try to explain to everybody that sorcery is not a common thing, but we still have people, as I've said before, who are not as educated and they seem to just follow the cult mentality. And this is what we have to break, the cult mentality. The government is putting some funding towards these sorcery type cases, and we are working with the Attorney-General at the moment to replace some of the laws that we have in place, to make it harsher so that people realise we're taking it seriously.
JB: And I suppose village elders and village chiefs might have to be held responsible if the community is protecting a bunch of men have killed or tortured someone who is accused of sorcery. They can't get away with that, can they?
JW: No they can't. That's why part of the thing is to hold those councillors and those leaders in those areas responsible. It's accelerated in these last two years. That's why we've put a task force together to investigate how and why.... Papua New Guinea has come online with internet and social media and people get curious on what the rest of the world is doing. What they are doing now, used to happen in the 16th and 14th century in England. You see, somebody is feeding the wrong information to our people. And we're going to try and find out who it is.
