Violence in Papua New Guinea appears to be increasing

RNZ News

10-07-2025

Paul Barker says PNG will need international assistance to address the law and order issues in the country. (file image)
Photo:
AFP/RNZ Pacific
Most recently there was an horrific murder in Hela where a mother of six was shot after being being burnt and tortured following accusations of sorcery.
In Port Moresby, bus drivers this week retaliated after one of their colleagues was killed in the suburb of Hanuabada.
National Capital District governor Powes Parkop pleaded with the drivers not to take the law into their own hands.
There have also been prolonged battles in various Highlands provinces, and last year a police strike sparked a calamitous riot in the capital.
Paul Barker, the executive director of the PNG Institute of National Affairs, spoke with RNZ Pacific about the violence.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
PAUL BARKER:
We're certainly having law and order problems that have in the past tended to be restricted to certain provinces and locations seem to have extended to additional provinces that were hitherto relatively peaceful, including East New Britain and other places in the islands.
But also, not just in the islands - through down to other coastal provinces, Madang and so on, and as you've seen, conflicts that have broken out in the streets of Moresby.
To some extent it relates to a lack of economic opportunities, frustration by young people, particularly; on the other hand it's also weak capacity for application of the rule of law, not just by the police, but by communities and cooperation between the different parties.
During this year, a major focus of the 2025 budget has been on enhancing police capacity. And that was a bit of a wake up call from the riots in January of last year.
They have got extra police that they've recruited and that are in training. We also know that the commissioner has terminated quite a lot of police over the last period of time for abuse and poor conduct and sometimes aggressive conduct.
Some of these problems emanate from some of the conflict zones in the Highlands, and you get young people, or whole families, who effectively are displaced from these Highlands communities, come to the towns and cities of PNG to escape pretty horrendous conflicts in Upper Highlands, particularly in Enga, Southern Highlands, Hela.
And again, we've had this dialogue with various parties, including the police, saying it cannot be addressed simply by more police on the ground. It needs to have more effective policing, better cooperation.
There are a lot of people who buy into that and who totally agree, including some in the government itself, who say, yes, just adding to the numbers of police without enhanced capacity, discipline and so on, will not, in itself, address these problems. In fact, it could even exacerbate that.
DON WISEMAN: You would like to see what happen?
PB:
We would like to see a system of cooperation. In the past, government was seen to be a neutral hand the old system, going back into colonial times, with the Kiap and so on. They were impartial in conflicts. Unfortunately, what we tend to see now is that a lot of people in government are seen to be party to the conflict.
You've got some instigating conflict for their own ends. They may be people who are living in Moresby or even sometimes outside the country, and they have effectively gangs who work for them back in their home provinces and stir up trouble. So we need to effectively neuter them to be able to work with the communities to establish effective community engagement and policing and early warning systems, and we need to make sure, for example, that the police do actually have the resources to be able to respond to cases very promptly.
We've got these sorcery accusation related violence (SARV). As highlighted in the media just lately, it seems that always, the police don't have a vehicle or don't have any fuel for their vehicle at the critical time when you've got to go and intervene to rescue someone.
The whole system of community engagement, the churches are some of the most effective at working on the ground, along with some of these other entities, human rights defenders and so on. But we do need this strong government, civil society.
The answer is not the Terrorism Act, which was rushed through just recently, and which risks making the situation worse by casting everyone, including, school kids, as terrorists just because they may be young and wandering the streets or traveling.
We need to have, instead of that antipathy and effectively, an autocratic approach, we need to establish our systems of community dialogue, and we need the leaders to be engaged and participating, not all remote, overseas, travelling or in their Land Cruisers somewhere else.
We need them to roll up their sleeves. We've got some very good examples where we've actually brought sides together.
There was one in Hagen, an ongoing tribal fight, and the leaders were all in Moresby, but some players on the ground brought conflicting sides together and said, 'Why are you even fighting each other? You're just doing this because your bosses tell you to do it, but if you actually look at it, you've got more in common with each other.' And the end of a long session, they were all playing football with each other and enjoying each other's company. And that was the end of a long conflict.
But it was stirred by old antipathies and power broking by these, they call them warlords, but we're told not to use the word 'warlords,' because that sort of engrandises them. They're not lords of anything. They're just war mongers as it were. So clearly, money is involved. Money gets involved with the arms' trade.
You've also got some of the other trades; the drugs trade and some of the other trades, but it's this melding of power, money, even the sorcery accusation related violence.
It's a new form of power, intimidating people and making yourself powerful and everyone being compliant with you. So we've got to break those systems, and that requires cooperation.
DW: Under the Terrorism Act, that's the lethal force allowance?
PB:
Yeah, that means you can go out and shoot anyone who happens to be inconvenient to you, and obviously that can open the Pandora's box. You can shoot political enemies, people who are critics, journalists, anyone else and it's certainly not what PNG needs.
DW: What you're talking about here, it's something of a revolution that would take a huge amount to achieve, wouldn't it? Do you think there is the wherewithal within the country to do it, to achieve it?
PB:
I think it's going to need a lot of international assistance, but it's going to have to be ideas,the commitment are going to have to come from within the country, so the outside world can support, in training, in dispute resolution, training for not just police, but for community leaders. We need that commitment.
There are certainly people who are seeing some of these issues, are seeing this is needed, and I think it's part of the dialog we have this 50 year review that's going on looking forward 20 years, 'How do we move forward and avoid many of the mistakes of the past'? So that review team is raising many of those issues.
A committee chaired by former deputy prime minister, Charles Abel, so they're trying to think outside the box and see where we can go forward. But all across the board, if you look at the statistics just lately, which have been put together in the latest economic and social reports from the ADB, from the World Bank and others, you'll see absolutely atrocious social indicators.
You see the economy growing slowly. You're seeing education capacity not growing. You get a lot of these functions, high malnutrition, low job creation, and so on and so forth.
We've got to address those together with the impacts of that, which is growing frustration and conflict developing in the urban areas where people have re-migrated.
The development partners, some of them, are aware of this, and they're throwing their hands a little bit in the air and saying, 'what do we do'? And academics are sort of doing that as well, and saying, 'Hey, look, you know, the only way is cooperation, working with those who are willing and able to provide leadership and think outside the box'.