The lawless streets of Papua New Guinea

Interesting article on PNG which appeared in The Australian yesterday. Was notified about it by friends in Australia.

Paul Toohey | April 01, 2009

Article from:  The Australian

SATURDAY night, late January. The incident is, by Port Moresby standards, neither here nor there. We come off an overpass and notice people scattering in light rain. Blocking traffic is an urban response-style light police truck, with a two-sided troop seat in the back. A woman is running, followed by two police. One of the officers punches her hard in the face, then she doubles over from what appears to be a truncheon in the guts

We go through a roundabout and come back. The woman is running now, arms crazy above her head as the police truck pursues her over gutters. Soon after, we find the woman and a group of her friends standing by the roadside, panting and bleeding heavily. One man has a deep gash running across his left cheek. The bashed woman is half-laughing, half-crying. They are drunk on "steam", the local metho-rated liquor cooked in secret stills, flavoured with orange cordial and sold dirt cheap in the markets.

The man with the cut face is leaning through the window, spraying bloody protestations of innocence. I ask why they didn't just run away. All they can repeat is: "It wasn't our fault; we didn't do anything."

Papua New Guineans will stand before they fall. "The trouble is," says my friend, as we drive off, "they are Goilala, which means they probably did do something, anything from holding up a car to illegally selling betel nut by the side of the road."

Goilala are conspicuously short street dwellers originally from the Central Province. They are branded Moresby's most prolific troublemakers, first suspects in any crime.

Programs to rid PNG's capital of crime are earnestly afoot. It won't be easy because criminal behaviour is not confined to street people. Moresby's police wield a brutal form of shoot-first, ask-later justice, and some people see PNG's politicians as notorious pork-barrellers.

When street people are asked to clean up their act, they ask: What about them?

Trust between the citizens of PNG and the authorities is broken. That explains why almost half of Australia's annual $358 million in aid to PNG goes to improving law and justice. Reinstating trust is crucial.

Yumi Lukautum Moresby ("You, me, look out for Moresby") is making a difference by building a bridge between the people of the notorious crime-breeding urban settlements - in which there is no electricity, no toilets, and a few shared taps for up to 5000 people - and the authorities.

Overcrowded Moresby routinely features in top 10 lists of the world's most dangerous cities. These rankings are decided by business or travel magazines, which see Moresby through the prism of tourists or expats, who live safely guarded in hotels or behind razor wire with all-night security guards.

The real test should be whether Moresby is safe for locals.

It is women who suffer most. Domestic and sexual violence is described by Amnesty International as endemic. Women fear reporting domestic violence partly because of their husbands, partly because police have a reputation for raping female complainants.

Dave Conn, Scottish-born executive head of the Port Moresby Chamber of Commerce, says Moresby is improving. Conn, a 30-year resident, is encouraged by his mate, an ex-Australian copper, the tireless Steve Sims, who helps run YLM. Using the chamber, which represents 220 businesses, Conn gently leans on members to give street people jobs.

They go through short skills courses and are placed with companies for work experience. AusAid, through YLM, pays the wages.

"Some are the kids straight out of jail and we're always up-front with employers," Conn says. "But it doesn't seem to bother many of them. Last year we found 70 per cent of them were retained."

Measures such as this are making Moresby safer, Conn says.

"We definitely think so. There are perceptions and everyone's got them. But right now you and I are driving through one of the roughest areas of Port Moresby, Kaugere, and I don't see any rocks coming towards us. A safe place is good for all of us. It's incumbent upon us to get involved."

YLM hunts corporate sponsorship, runs awareness campaigns, gets kids playing sport and works with government. It has organised a toll-free number to evacuate women and children from violent situations using a private security company. In PNG, people can't rely on police to respond to 000. In Australia, this would be seen as a spectacular failure by police. But Conn and Sims, who persuaded two private companies, Protect Security and phone company Digicel, to donate the service, are not interested in exploring the point. In PNG, do it however you can.

Badili police station, near the bayside settlement of Rabiagini, is one of the several squalid Goilala Moresby strongholds.

The occasion today is a presentation by YLM of certificates to young men who participated in a Christmas-safe program, whereby they banded together to protect their community. It is seen as an achievement to get 50 settlement youth to voluntarily enter a police compound.

"A big change has taken place," Badili's chief sergeant Albert Saiyomina declares. "This was one of the worst areas to be stationed in a suburban police station. Since YLM started we have changed our approach and, as a result of engaging the youth, I have seen a very big drop in the crime rate."

Everyone is saying Moresby is safer than five years ago, but you'll still hit the accelerator hard through the several well-known trouble spots. One explanation for the lessening crime rate is that so many leading criminals - they don't much call them raskols these days, it's seen as too cute - aredead.

"This is not Australia," says "Lincoln", an urban-response cop who was retired for a serious indiscretion. "I myself have killed, well, many criminals. Some of them have real guns, supplied to them by the police. Some of them have homemade guns, which only give them one shot.

"Either way, you have to kill them. And if you hit one, another will get up and take his place. You watch how the Pukpuks (PNG's rugby union team) play. You'll see the same thing in an armed robbery. One sacrifices himself so others can go over."

YLM works closely with the National Capital District Commission, Moresby's governance base, on urban renewal. The streets are cleaner and the NCDC's governor, Powes Parkop, has posters of himself pleading with people not to chew betel nut. The red trails of pavement slag are unsightly. Gangs of young men are employed to move betel sellers on, but some have enjoyed their work too much, beating old women with fanbelts and sticks. The betel wars are not winnable; too many New Guineans enjoy a good chew. Nor has the NCDC explained how sellers may otherwise buy food.

Young settlement men are forthright, articulate and neither proud nor ashamed of their long criminal histories. The abyss between crime and work could be bridged if boys had a chance.

"We unemployed youth sell drugs and alcohol, and we also consume both," says Francis Tokai, 28, a Goilala who writes songs for YLM promotions.

"We have no proper leadership in this settlement. It has broken down. Where you are standing, this was a forbidden zone only a few years ago. You would never have come here. Our reputation is really bad. It is because of unemployment, prostitution, criminality, illegal informal businesses, home brew and drugs: all the things that help us survive.

"We regard these settlements as a temporary place to live, but the truth is we have been here for generations. We have no toilets, no electricity.

"But we won't go back to the hills where we came from. We will live and die here. We have been abandoned by the city planners. For dinner we eat rice and scones. That's all. My government never thinks about us. (Prime Minister)Michael Somare should resign."

Tokai's dad put his son through to year 10 but times are not the same. Tokai, who has two young children, will never afford the fees to send each child to school.

Like 90 per cent of settlement children, his children will never go to school. At the start of the school year, Bank South Pacific ran newspaper ads offering parents school-fee loans. It seemed cruel.

PNG is a small wealthy country exporting timber, oil, seafood, coffee, tea and cocoa. It has one of the world's largest goldmines and big gas prospects. It receives aid from Australia, China, Japan, the European Union and the World Bank. The money doesn't hit the ground.

Bauai Laiam is a Rabiagini settlement leader, a Goilala who describes himself as a reformed criminal. His battered nose and missing teeth tell of many battles with the law.

"I've been jailed for drinking beer, break and enter, attempted murder, armed robbery. It was police who broke my teeth," he says. "I've been bashed by them so many times I've lost count. I've been to prison 10, 20times."

YLM uses ex-criminals such as Laiam to gain a foothold in communities. And settlement people are prepared to turn the corner. But they want something back: free schooling, for starters.

This faith in education is hard to fathom; it doesn't seem to have done the parents any good. There is disbelief when I relate that the north Australian indigenous experience of free schooling and low attendance; equal disbelief that health services are free and that our welfare system paid much better than their minimum wage.

Australian priest Mike Field runs Port Moresby City Mission. He has a few hectares that are home for 120 boys at any time.

"The dream is to take a boy who's been running the streets, give him basic literacy, numeracy, gardening and building skills, and routine discipline," he says. "The boys we deal with are those who need a second chance and those who've never had a first one."

Every fortnight a panel interviews 90 street kids applying for 15 placements. "It's an awful thing to have to make the decision as to who we take on," says Field. The boys stay nine to 18 months, after which YLM tries to find them full-time work.

"The first thing we do is feed them," Field says. "Just eating seems to knock a bit of the anger out of them."

The consensus is that employment is the best chance boys have of not ending up dead from a bullet or in prison.

Moresby has had enough of its war-zone reputation and there is the merest glimmer that it is picking itself up. As well, the place would improve exponentially if Australians forced aside some of their justified scepticism and chose to revisit their old PNG friends or find new ones.