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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:

http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?id=ENGPRE200902109371&lang=e

 

Amnesty International

February, 10 2009

Papua New Guinea: Authorities Must Act Now to Prevent More Witch Hunts

 

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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http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2009/01/13/2003433590

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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http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/01/08/png.witchcraft/

 

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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