Allan Bird: Punishing offenders must come first to tackle PNG's cycle of violence

RNZ News

2 days ago

Allan Bird
Photo:
Facobook / Allan Bird
RNZ Pacific has been looking at the pervasive levels of violence in Papua New Guinea and how the country might overcome it.
According to the Human Rights Watch
World Report 2024
, violence and conflict over resources have resulted in more than 400 deaths and displaced over 20,000 people since the 2022 general elections.
In May, Dr Sinclair Dinnen, a security expert at the Australian National University (ANU),
spoke of the fraying of the consent
of the community that police used to be able to rely on.
He said some of this can be attributed to behaviour on the part of the police force itself, along with the fairly violent context in which many people find themselves living in PNG.
The executive director of the Institute of National Affairs, Paul Barker,
told us last week
that the lawlessness is, at least partly, a reflection of the social and economic plight of the country.
He said beefing up the police alone, as the government is planning to do, will not work if it does not take the wider community with it.
The governor of East Sepik Province, Allan Bird, told RNZ Pacific that the immediate focus must be on policing, with a hard push to punish the offenders, before there can be talk of jobs and education.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
ALLAN BIRD:
For violence, I think the most important thing is that we need police to actually identify people, prosecute them and put them in jail, as a deterrent.
At the moment, one statistic we had some time back was that we get about 18,000 arrests for violent crime, and out of the 18,000 we get something like 200 convictions a year. So, it is almost like a licence for people to continue doing it.
Until we get more boots on the ground in terms of policemen, better preparation of case files and better prosecution, these things are not going to get better overnight, unfortunately.
DON WISEMAN: I've been speaking with Paul Barker. He says there's a whole series of factors involved in this. There's the lack of opportunity that people have, absolutely lack of jobs, lack of proper education opportunities. This is a problem that's very common around the world right now, and I guess going to become increasingly so. And he also says it's all very well to up the numbers of police, but they've got to be properly resourced. They've got to have plenty of vehicles, and there's got to be a lot more involvement of the community, because these problems are bigger than just lawlessness. It's a breakdown of social values and everything else.
AB:
I totally agree with that. My thinking is it is a chicken and egg question. Now, what do you do first? Do you go out and try to create the jobs and get people educated and all of that? We have got seven million people in this country that are already victims of these failures in the system. Those people are already there. Education is going to take us 20 years, and of course, we have got to do all those things.
We have got a government that is totally inept. It does not know what it is doing, and we are not going to get the jobs that we need in the next six to 12 or even 18 months, unless you have got smarter people running the country making better decisions.
So that's the reason why, for me, I am cutting straight to the policing because unless you get smart leadership in Papua New Guinea, I will be dead by the time they sort those things out to be honest with you.
I am going for the easy win at the moment, which is, beef up the law and order. And if you do, there might be people who would be interested to come and invest their money that will create jobs and opportunities and all of those sorts of things. In fact, there is been almost zero investments in Papua New Guinea in the last 15 years. We are not doing really great in the jobs area, to be honest.
DW: Takes money, of course.
AB:
It takes confidence. It takes a lot of things for private sector to come and invest their money, not just in Papua New Guinea, but anywhere else in the world.
They look for security for their investments. No one is going to come and toss a billion kina, billion dollars in Papua New Guinea to sort of invest in something if, you know, they don't trust the government. They don't trust the systems, if there's no law and order. It comes back to your chicken and egg question.