WUNRN
Please see 3 parts of this WUNRN
release on Papua New Guinea and "witches," "sorcery,"
violence against women.
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Full Article Link:
Amnesty International
February, 10 2009
The
government of Papua New Guinea must act now to end a rash of more than 50
killings related to allegations of sorcery, Amnesty International said today.
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Papua New Guinea to Crack Down on Killing of ‘Witches’
AFP, PORT MORESBY
January 13, 2009
Papua
New Guinea will toughen laws against sorcery-related killings after a surge in
murders of people accused of witchcraft, reports said yesterday.
The Constitutional Review and Law Reform Commission will strengthen the laws
after more than 50 people were killed in sorcery-related murders over the past
year, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation said.
Commission chairman Joe Mek Teine said people in the country’s volatile
Highlands region were using accusations of witchcraft to get rid of people.
“It’s the easy way out for someone to kill somebody else, and use sorcery as an
excuse,” he told the broadcaster.
“And you would find that the victim is totally innocent,” he said.
Mek Teine said the new laws could force rural courts to be harder on defendants
in cases involving sorcery-related killings.
The Post-Courier newspaper quoted him as saying “a lot of people are being
killed on allegations of sorcery.”
The newspaper said that many victims of these crimes, especially women and
older men, were murdered after being accused of causing deaths through sorcery.
“It is a problem that has been existing in the country before the arrival of
Western influence and it’s deeply rooted,” Mek Teine told the paper on
Thursday.
“The churches have done a lot to improve it but it’s getting worse every time,”
he said.
Last week, a young woman was stripped naked, gagged and burnt alive at the
stake in the Highlands town of Mount Hagen in what some speculated was a
sorcery-related crime.
Reports said the victim could have been accused of sorcery, adultery or of
passing on HIV/AIDS to one of her killers.
“If it is alleged she was a sorcerer, this is yet one more example of hysteria
and superstition running rampant in parts of our country,” the Post-Courier
said in an editorial at the time.
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January
8, 2009
PAPUA NEW GUINEA - WOMAN SUSPECTED
OF WITCHCRAFT BURNED ALIVE
By
Saeed Ahmed
(CNN) -- A woman in rural Papua New
Guinea was bound and gagged, tied to a log and set ablaze on a pile of tires
this week, possibly because villagers suspected her of being a witch, police
said Thursday.
Her death adds to a growing list of men and women who have
been accused of sorcery and then tortured or killed in the South Pacific island
nation, where traditional beliefs hold sway in many regions.
The victims are often scapegoats for someone else's
unexplained death, and bands of tribesmen collude to mete out justice to them
for their supposed magical powers, police said.
"We have had difficulties in a number of previous
incidents convincing people to come forward with information," said Simon
Kauba, assistant commissioner of police and commander of the Highlands region,
where the killing occurred.
"We are trying to persuade them to help. Somebody lost
their mother or daughter or sister Tuesday morning."
Early Tuesday, a group of people dragged the woman, believed
to be in her late teens to early 20s, to a dumping ground outside the city of
Mount Hagen. They stripped her naked, bound her hands and legs, stuffed a cloth
in her mouth, tied her to a log and set her on fire, Kauba said.
"When the people living nearby went to the dump site to
investigate what caused the fire, they found a human being burning in the
flames," he said. "It was ugly."
The country's Post-Courier newspaper reported Thursday that
more than 50 people were killed in two Highlands provinces last year for
allegedly practicing sorcery.
In a well-publicized case last year, a pregnant woman gave
birth to a baby girl while struggling to free herself from a tree. Villagers
had dragged the woman from her house and hung her from the tree, accusing her
of sorcery after her neighbor suddenly died.
She and the baby survived, according to media reports.
The killing of witches, or sangumas, is not a new phenomenon
in rural areas of the country.
Emory University anthropology professor Bruce Knauft, who
lived in a village in the western province of Papua New Guinea in the early 1980s,
traced family histories for 42 years and found that one in three adult deaths
were homicides -- "the bulk of these being collective killings of
suspected sorcerers," he wrote in his book, "From Primitive to
Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology."
In recent years, as AIDS has taken a toll in the nation of
6.7 million people, villagers have blamed suspected witches -- and not the
virus -- for the deaths.
According to the United Nations, Papua New Guinea accounts
for 90 percent of the Pacific region's HIV cases and is one of four
Asia-Pacific countries with an epidemic.
"We've had a number of cases where people were killed
because they were accused of spreading HIV or AIDS," Kauba said.
While there is plenty of speculation why Tuesday's victim was
killed, police said they are focused more on who committed the crime.
"If it is phobias about alleged HIV/AIDS or claims of a
sexual affair, we must urge the police and judiciary to throw the book at the
offenders," the Post-Courier wrote in an editorial.
"There are remedies far, far better than to torture and immolate a young woman before she can be judged by a lawful system."
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