WUNRN
PAPUA NEW GUINEA - WOMEN TORTURED AS
"WITCHES" - RAMPANT VAW
Vlad Sokhin
A women’s rights advocate shows a photo of Angela, naked, gashed and burned, surrounded by the torpid crowd.
By Jo Chandler - February 15, 2013
Belief in black magic persists in Papua New Guinea, where communities are warping under the pressure of the mining boom’s unfulfilled expectations. Women are blamed, accused of sorcery and branded as witches — with horrific consequences.
“They’re going to cook the
sanguma mama!”
The shout went up from a posse of
children as they raced past the health clinic in a valley deep in the Papua New
Guinean highlands. Inside, Swiss-born nurse and nun Sister Gaudentia Meier —
40-something years and a world away from the ordered alps of her homeland — was
getting on with her daily routine, patching the wounds and treating the
sicknesses of an otherwise woefully neglected population. It was around
lunchtime, she recalls.
Sister Gaudentia knew immediately
the spectacle the excited children were rushing to see. They were on their way
to a witch-burning. There are many names for dark magic in the 850 tongues of
Two days earlier she had tried to
rescue Angela (not her real name), an accused witch, when she was first seized
by a gang of merciless inquisitors looking for someone to blame for the recent
deaths of two young men. They had stripped their quarry naked, blindfolded her,
berated her with accusations and slashed her with bush knives (machetes). The
“dock” for her trial was a rusty length of corrugated roofing, upon which she
was displayed trussed and helpless. Photographs taken by a witness on a mobile
phone show that the packed, inert public gallery encircling her included
several uniformed police.
In Papua New Guinea, the Pacific
nation just a short boat ride from Australia’s far north, 80 per cent of the 7
million-plus population live in rural and remote communities. Many have little
access to even basic health and education, surviving on what they eat or earn
from their gardens. There are few roads out, but a burgeoning network of
digital-phone towers and dirt-cheap handsets now connect them to the world —
assuming they can plug into power and scrounge a few kina-worth of credit.
Vlad Sokhin
The beautiful landscape of PNG’s highlands belies the brutal reality of
life in the region, where more than 90 per cent of women report suffering
gender-based violence.
The resources-rich country is in
the midst of a mining boom, but the wealth bypasses the vast majority. In their
realities, some untouched by outside influence until only a couple of
short-lived generations ago, enduring tradition widely resists the notion that
natural causes, disease, accident or recklessness might be responsible for a
death. Rather, bad magic is the certain culprit.
“When people die, especially men,
people start asking ‘Who’s behind it?’, not ‘What’s behind it?’” says Dr Philip
Gibbs, a longtime PNG resident, anthropologist, sorcery specialist and Catholic
priest.
Last year, a two-year
investigation by the country’s Constitutional and Law Reform Commission
observed that the view that sorcery or witchcraft must be to blame for sickness
or early death is commonly held across PNG.
Many educated, city-dwelling
Papua New Guineans also espouse some belief in sorcery. But in the words of the
editor of the national daily Post Courier, Alexander Rheeney, city and
country-folk alike overwhelmingly “recoil in fear and disgust” at lynch-mobs
pursuing payback, and at the kind of extremist cruelty that Sister Gaudentia
was about to witness.
Angela’s accusers — young men
from another town, high on potent highlands dope and “steam” (home-brewed
hooch) — had come back for her. Sister Gaudentia suspected the same mob had
tortured a young woman she nursed a few months earlier. She had dragged
herself, “how … I don’t know”, says the nun, into the clinic, her genitals
burned and fused beyond functional repair by the repeated intrusions of red-hot
irons.
The concept of a serial-offending
torture squad hunting down witches doesn’t fit the picture anthropologists have
assembled of the customs that underwrite sorcery “pay-back” in parts of PNG.
Attacks are, as a general rule, the spontaneous act of a grieving family,
inspired often by vengeance, and sometimes by fear that evil magic will be
exercised again. But experts also concede there are caveats to every rule in
PNG. One of the most ethnically diverse landscapes in the world, PNG is
endlessly confounding to outsiders, and even as modern explorers strive to pin
down aspects of the old world, it changes before them.
As more reports of sorcery-related
atrocities find their way into the PNG media, United Nations’ forums, and human rights investigations, there are
concerns that the profile of this social terrorism is shifting. Ritual attacks
on accused sorcerers — historically brutal in some parts, notoriously so in the
punishing highlands — appear to have broken out of traditional boundaries, and
now crop up in communities where they have no history.
Despite a lack of data and the
suspicion that only a fraction of incidents are ever reported, the 2012 Law
Reform Commission examination of sorcery-related attacks concluded that they
have been rising since the 1980s. It estimated about 150 cases of violence and
killings are occurring each year in just one volatile province, Simbu — wild,
prime coffee country deep in the nation’s rugged spine. Figures vary enormously
but volumes of published reports by UN agencies, Amnesty International, Oxfam
and anthropologists provide unequivocal evidence that attacks on accused
sorcerers and witches — sometimes men, but most commonly women — are frequent,
ferocious and often fatal.
Instead reports indicate
tradition has in places morphed into something more malignant, sadistic and
voyeuristic, stirred up by a potent brew of booze and drugs; the angry despair
of lost youth; upheaval of the social order in the wake of rapid development
and the super-charged resources enterprise; the arrival of cash currency and
the jealousies it invites; rural desperation over broken roads; schools and
health systems propelling women out of customary silence and men, struggling to
find their place in this shifting landscape bitterly, often
brutally, resentful.
“I have been in PNG since 1969,”
says Sister Gaudentia. “We always had sanguma, but not to the extreme,
not like it is now.”
Gibbs, who has published many
articles on the issue, agrees that attacks have become more brutal. “It used to
be that they would push someone over a cliff, something like that. They still
ended up dead, but it wasn’t the torture, like now. This interrogation, this
public stuff, with the kids watching, it becomes a spectacle.”
On the first day of Angela’s
agonies, the nun pleaded with the watching police to intervene. Why would they
and other community leaders not act? Gibbs explains: “Even if they would want
to stop the violence, they have little power today in the face of a village mob
— particularly when many young men within the mob are affected by alcohol or
drugs”.
PNG’s police force is underpaid,
under-resourced and under-trained. It’s also notoriously corrupt and abusive.
Many members subscribe to sorcery belief and some may see the interrogation of
women like Angela as legitimate under custom, a view some argue is encouraged
by the controversial PNG Sorcery Act of 1971, which
acknowledges the existence of sorcery and criminalises both those who practice it
and those who attack people accused of sorcery.
On that opening day of her
“trial”, Angela was tortured, humiliated and interrogated; an absurd Monty
Python-esque parody of prosecution in which she was in one moment accused
of causing the deaths, the next being asked to give up the name of the real
witch — “kolim nem, kolim nem [call the name]”, the gang
demanded. At one point, in wracked desperation, she shouted out the name of
another woman, but her accusers showed no interest.
For reasons not clear, they let
her go, and the next day Sister Gaudentia heard she had been taken to a holding
room at the police station, apparently for her safety. The nun tried to see her
but the room was locked and no-one could locate the key. “I thought she was
safe.” She later learned that at some point the police had released Angela
after her attackers signed pledges to leave her alone.
It was lunchtime the next day
when Sister heard the children’s chilling chorus outside the clinic window. “I
left the car up the road and then we went into the village. At least we tried
to go in,” the Sister recalls. The crowd was so dense she couldn’t push
through. “I went back to the car and drove to the police station to report that
they were torturing her again. The police commander said, ‘We can’t do
anything. They promised me they wouldn’t.’”
Sister drove back, taking a
priest with her. This time they fought their way through. “There must have been
600 people watching; men, women and children — a lot of them.”
Angela was naked, staked-out,
spread-eagled on a rough frame before them, a blindfold tied over her eyes, a
fire burning in a nearby drum. Being unable to see can only have inflated her
terror, her sense of powerlessness and the menace around her; breathing the
smoke and feeling the heat of the fire where the irons being used to burn her
were warmed until they glowed. Would she be cooked, on that fire? She must have
known it had happened to others before — and would soon infamously happen
again, the pictures finding their way around the world.
The photographs witnesses took of
Angela’s torture are shocking, both for the cruelty of the attackers and the
torpid body-language of the spectators. Stone-faced men and women and wide-eyed
children huddle under umbrellas, sheltering from the drenched highlands air as
Angela writhes against the tethers at her wrists and ankles, twisting her body
away from the length of hot iron which a young man aims at her genitals. [The
photograph of Angela accompanying this article, taken on the first day of
Angela’s torture, is confronting, but chosen as less humiliating and dangerous
than pictures taken on the second day which would identify key individuals.]
Angela — a woman in her late 40s
— is the mother of a small boy, says Philip Gibbs, who later collected her
testimony and that of witnesses to her ordeal. Typical of the victims of
sorcery-related attacks and killings in the highlands, she had been existing on
the margins of her community. She had no husband or male family to protect her.
Custom often requires women to leave behind the safe enclave of their own place
and family when they marry. If their husband dies or leaves or abuses them,
they find themselves stranded on “foreign” soil. As Gibbs has documented in his
published work, which delves into the dynamics of accused and accusers, “when a
family, believing that death comes through human agency, looks for a scapegoat
to accuse, fingers will very often point at a woman without influential
brothers or strong sons”.
Sister Gaudentia shouted over
Angela’s screams, part begging, part ordering the interrogators she calls “the
marijuana boys” to cease their assaults. “They held me back, stopped me getting
to her,” she says. When Gibbs later investigated, he learned that the nun had
put herself at dire risk — the torturers had tried to burn her, too. It was
perhaps only her pale expat skin that saved her.
When there was nothing more she
could do to stop Angela’s torment, the Sister gathered her clinic staff around
her and shouted out to the crowd. “I called on the people. I asked, ‘Who here
is a Catholic? Come, we will pray the rosary.’
“And a lot of people came and
prayed with me. We prayed the whole rosary.” Angela’s suffering echoed around
them through their invocation, the ritual comforts of one belief system
colliding with the atrocities of another.
“A man came from another village
and drove us back to the police and we pleaded with them again to come,” Sister
recalls. She was still at the station when Angela was cut down. By then there
was heavy rain falling. Perhaps the fire had gone out. Perhaps some of the
sport had been dampened. Perhaps police did intervene.
It was around 5pm when “the
marijuana boys” let Angela go, more than four hours after they began their assaults.
When Angela’s elderly mother tried to attend to her they set upon her too,
breaking her leg and her pelvis.
Later a police car delivered
Angela and her mother to Sister Gaudentia’s clinic. “We treated them that
night. People came to our house and wanted us to send these women out, but we
didn’t.”
Then the mob grew and began
shouting and throwing stones on the clinic roof, and Sister called the police,
fearing the clinic would be burned down. “This time a different policeman came,
he was really concerned. We had to agree to let the women go to the police cell
for their own protection. We took them food.”
With that officer’s help, they
smuggled Angela and her mother away by car, taking them a long way away,
eventually finding them care in another hospital. When their physical wounds
were healed, she was relocated again. She has now joined the ranks of sorcery
survivors who are not only damaged but forever displaced by their experiences, refugees within their own country, forced
away from the land many of them rely on for survival.
She remains in hiding with her
young son.
LAST THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7, Papua
New Guineans woke to the headline “Burnt Alive!” and pictures of a large crowd,
including school children, watching as flames engulfed the body of a young
woman.
It happened in the busy,
mercurial hub of
The killing was reportedly
carried out by relatives of a six-year-old boy who had just died in the local
hospital. They seized a couple of women they suspected of causing the death,
among them Leniata, and soon determined that she would be the scapegoat of
their grief. Witnesses claimed the crowd blocked police officers and firefighters
who tried to intervene.
The news provoked a statement of
“deep concern” from the UN human rights office and international media
coverage. PNG Prime Minister Peter O’Neill condemned the killing as a
“despicable” and “barbaric” act. He said he had instructed police to use all
available manpower to bring the killers to justice.
“It is reprehensible that women,
the old, and the weak in our society, should be targeted for alleged sorcery or
wrongs that they actually have nothing to do with,” said O’Neill. Similar
sentiments resounded across PNG’s always animated social media scene, and
included a push for a campaign to enlist Leniata’s name and legacy to rally
momentum to address endemic, epidemic violence against women.
Leniata’s death and the anguish
it provoked reprised a very similar scenario only two years ago, also on a rubbish
tip in Mount Hagen, when an unidentified young woman — according to some
reports, possibly as young as 16 — was tied at the stake and burned. But this time there were pictures.
The horror of the act, and the passivity of the watching crowd, sent shockwaves
across the country.
As the Post Courier’s
Rheeney editorialised, the failure of witnesses to intervene, “to stop and
condemn the murderers’ actions, points to a bigger danger of ordinary Papua New
Guineans accepting this callous killing as normal and this methodology of
dispensing justice as acceptable.
“Respect for the rule of law and the rights of
others are pillars of a modern-day democracy, and we would like to think PNG
falls under this category,” he wrote. Leniata’s murder raised questions, he
noted, about whether “we believe that justice is dispensed in a legally
constituted court of law and not a kangaroo court chaired by individuals misled
by superstition and trickery”.
The earlier witch-burning at
Now Rheeney’s editorial echoed
the view of many PNG commentators and international human-rights groups when it
urged the Government to at least pursue one powerful, urgent measure and
fast-track the key recommendation to emerge from the review: repeal the Sorcery
Act.
The 1971 Act, in its preamble, acknowledges “widespread
belief throughout the country that there is such a thing as sorcery, and
sorcerers have extra-ordinary powers that can be used sometimes for good
purposes but more often bad ones”. It distinguishes “innocent sorcery”, defined
as protective and curative, from “forbidden sorcery” — everything else.
The Act, the review explains, was
largely aimed at recognising the reality of citizens’ concerns and to provide a
mechanism for them to have an accused sorcerer dealt with by the courts rather
than taking the law into their own hands. Extensive consultations out in the
PNG provinces over the past two years revealed that many communities still
wanted the law to recognise that sorcery was real and active, and to provide
systems to prosecute and punish sorcerers and their accomplices.
As the late Sir Buri Kidu, PNG’s
first national Chief Justice, observed in a judgment in 1980, “in many
communities in
Vlad Sokhin
Rasta was accused of sorcery by people in her village after the death of a
young man in 2003. She was set upon by a crowd at his funeral, beaten and
strangled until she escaped. She lost her hand in the attack.
The review concluded that the
Sorcery Act had plainly not prevented bad magic, and nor had it punished
practitioners. What it had done was provide legal refuge for murderers and
vigilantes to argue sorcery as a mitigating factor, allowing self-styled
witch-killers — and comparatively few have even been prosecuted — to get off
with light sentences.
After examining various options
for amending the Act, the Commission has recommended its repeal, but with
provision for village courts to continue to deal with sorcery disputes. It has
drafted a Bill to that effect that commission secretary, Dr Eric Kwa, hopes
will go before the PNG Parliament in the next few months.
“I’m really appalled by the
[latest] reports,” Kwa told The Global Mail. “It is really sickening
that Papua New Guineans are not able to stand up for the weak and vulnerable to
oppose this evil in our society. We hope that with the repeal of the Sorcery
Act [if the recommendation is supported], the normal criminal liabilities will
apply in terms of serious crimes such as the one we read of today.”
Many commentators argue it will
take much more than a change in legislation to achieve any meaningful inroads
against the violence. Anthropologist Philip Gibbs, whose archive of work was
heavily drawn on by the Law Reform Commission review, is one of them.
At the national level he urges
the Government to also set up a PNG human-rights council — a measure promised
in the past — and to consider establishing special police task forces to pursue
killers. Human rights and UN agencies have repeatedly slammed PNG police for
failing to intervene to stop attacks or to arrest suspects. But they also
recognise the besieged force requires monumental investment in training,
resources and equipment if it is to be effective.
As one 2011 UN report summarised, the PNG constabulary lacks
everything from adequate pay, uniforms and accommodation to leadership. As a
consequence, corruption is rife and morale poor. Police have almost no
intelligence-gathering capacity. The likelihood of criminals being caught has
been estimated at less than 3 per cent.
Even assuming the political will
emerges to invest in stronger policing and community protection, it will be
years before the terrorism fades in communities like Simbu, an epicentre for
violence. Aid and development agencies have also been reluctant to touch the
issue, says Richard Eves. “For many years religion was a taboo for donor
agencies. Because it is so cultural and so complex, it’s not easy to come up
with projects to address it.”
In the meantime concerned
citizens, local human-rights activists and churches — deeply engaged with their
congregations, and often the only functional institutions in sight — are
devising grassroots interventions, some of them with substantial effect,
according to Gibbs.
One such program is championed by
Bishop Anton Bal, the Catholic bishop of Kundiawa, the capital of Simbu. Born
and raised in the province’s remote south, he’s enlisting his networks and his
understanding of the culture to find ways to infiltrate and change thinking.
Working with him is Polish-born surgeon and priest Father Jan Jaworski, whose work in the
community as a healer of body and soul over more than 25 years resonates
widely, earning authority.
Through its close connections to
families the diocese is able to measure the reverberating damage from sorcery
violence. The casualties number many more than the dead. The bishop’s office
has estimated that as much as 10 to 15 per cent of the population have been
displaced by fallout from accusations and attacks, many of them banished, their
homes and sustaining gardens destroyed.
Bishop Bal argues that the
catch-22 with sorcery is that the more it’s talked about, the greater its power
and allure. So his programs include training up networks of local parish
volunteers as a kind of resistance movement. Operatives deflect and douse
conversations about blame as soon as a death in the community occurs. They go
to the funeral and when someone brings up the question of sanguma they
shift the topic — talk about the weather, shut it down. Or raise the alarm.
Kundiawa is in name a provincial
capital, but in reality a pit stop on the nation’s only east-west thoroughfare,
the
At Kundiawa Hospital, which is
distinguished by the proud efforts of its staff and community as something of a
showpiece within PNG’s weary provincial hospital network, Jaworski sees
patients with sorcery-related trauma being admitted at least a couple of times
a week. “[They’re] usually women, but not only. It’s the tip of the iceberg. It
is still very strong [the belief]. It is part of the system of justice.” After
so many years at sanguma ‘Ground Zero’, there’s not much that shocks
him.
Part of his practice is to use
the influence he has gained to interrupt the cycle of accusation and
prosecution, to go to the grieving family and explain medical cause of death
whenever he has the opportunity, and pray that his story finds its way onto the
bush telegraph and around the district.
Not long ago the brother of a
local politician died. When Jaworski got word that some 300 family members had
gathered and were milling about looking for someone to blame, he went and
confronted the mob. “I told them [his death] was his own responsibility. He was
a fat man. He didn’t look after himself. Sometimes you have to put the
responsibility on the person who has gone, or it hurts someone else.”
On another occasion he confronted
the family of a young woman who had died of HIV/AIDS. When she was still a girl
the family had given her to an older man in the community. She became his third
wife, and then she became infected and sickened, leaving behind a young baby.
“I told them ‘It is your fault she died — not sanguma. You sold her as
a third wife.’ I wanted to burden them with the responsibility, otherwise they
will just accuse someone else.
“The uncle stood up and said,
‘Thank you for providing the explanation — we will not go for sanguma’.
It was a hard thing for the family to hear’ — and, the priest admits, a
nerve-wracking thing to say to a riled Simbu family — “but otherwise some
innocent will be tortured and killed.”
Anecdotal testimony, discreetly
shared, points to a substantial and growing underground movement of
self-proclaimed human-rights defenders working within communities to identify
and hide people who are at risk of attack, or who have survived. In some of the
most fraught parts of the highlands aid agency Oxfam engages in a range of
programs that support some of those evolving networks.
But people operate in this sphere
do so at some personal risk. In a locally infamous case in 2005 highlighted by
the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Anna Benny, a
woman in Goroka who had a reputation for fearless work protecting and
supporting rape victims, tried to defend her sister-in-law from allegations of
sorcery. Both women were killed. Police took no action.
In his interviews surveying
survivors of sorcery-violence, including Angela — the woman likely rescued by
the intervention of Sister Gaudentia and some heavy rain — Philip Gibbs
identifies a consistent, fortifying thread. Those victims who lived to tell the
tale owe their lives either to individual police members or to a strong church
leader who intervened for them. “In effect it means that, if sufficiently
motivated to act, the power of the police and civil authorities, or the power
of the church, can be enough to defend a person who is otherwise powerless.”
Supporting people with the will
and courage to exercise their power at the grassroots to tackle violence in any
of its manifestations — domestic, social, sorcery-related — is the focus of Bal
and Jaworski. Parables of successful interventions become their currency of
hope. But they admit they are often despairing.
Jaworski blames much of the
escalating violence in all spheres on deeper social malaise, in particular the
angry frustrations of young men, and for which there are no easy remedies.
“Today 70 to 90 per cent of young people are unemployed. They went to school,
but there is no future for them. They don’t fit back in their gardens and their
villages.” They are without prospects in the new world, and without skills for
the old one.
On bleaker mornings, navigating
broken roads strewn with rocks from a night of fighting, or stitching up the
casualties in the operating theatre, Jaworski worries that the rage of young
men will one day propel the community back to the tumbuna (the time of
the ancestors).
“I hope I am a wrong prophet.”