Share this story if you’d like to elevate awareness on this issue, one of the few remaining witch hunts on Earth. And if this is something that you would like to personally have a hand in fixing, consider making a donation to Amnesty International. They’re working in the area to bring an end to the practice, but they need the funds to do so. Also, let us know in the comments section if we should be taking a more proactive role in ending this alarming practice.
With the rare exception of anti-Harry Potter crusaders, fear of witchcraft isn’t exactly on the radar of most westerners.
If you’re a farmer in California, you might even dabble in it to save your harvest from drought.
But on the island of New Guinea, the unexpected often turns up — and it can be deadly.
Unlike the pro surfers that went hunting for untouched waves in West Papua and found a government-waged genocide instead, the growing crisis in Papua New Guinea centers on self-inflicted violent witch hunts within the nation’s rural citizenry.
Men and woman alike have fallen victim to these attacks, though women are the more common victims in one of the most-violent places for females in the world.
A Doctors Without Borders (MSF) report found that 67% of women in PNG said that they had been beaten by a spouse.
Anton Lutz, a Lutheran missionary working in PNG’s problematic highlands, claims that at least two dozen women have been killed in the past few years over accusations of witchcraft and evil sorcery. In the Simbu region alone, roughly 150 attacks take place annually, leaving up to a third of the region’s population displaced.
A Chimbu tribesman preparing for a celebration of death. This remote region of PNG is where many of these sorcery killings take place (Photo: Imgur)
For places that require a plane ride and several days of hiking to reach, addressing this small but pressing refugee crisis has proved nearly impossible.
Today’s problem dates back to 1971 when PNG codified belief in witchcraft into law, recognising the “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,” exempting “innocent sorcery” for protection from the legal punishment for “forbidden sorcery.”
Hundreds of bystanders watch Helen Rumbali, a woman accused of witchcraft, being burned alive Feb. 6, 2014, in the Western Highlands provincial capital of Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea (Photo: AP)
That law wasn’t overturned until May of 2013, when witch hunt killings were also made punishable by death.
It was a step in the right direction, but it didn’t actually address the root causes of these attacks, which remain unaddressed.
Most of PNG’s population, some 80%, live outside of urban centres.
But instead of seeing their acts as primitive savagery, they should instead be understood as a consequence of things that affect much of the rural developing world: a dire lack of access to education and healthcare.
In an interview with Vice, missionary Franco Zocca said, “When you say sorcery-related killings, people — 95% — think other people were killed by sorcerers.
"The mentality is always that nobody dies for nothing.
"There is always a who — either a spirit of somebody or a magician — behind the death.”
With poor education, many simply don’t understand the science behind medical issues that befall humans naturally.
Blaming some vague evil concocted by other people, particularly those living on the fringes of their communities, then becomes the only viable explanation.
What is worst about all of this is the simple fact that it could remedied with greater access to basic healthcare.
Fewer people ailing and dying would mean less cause to blame witchcraft and sorcery.
Fixing these core issues would require that a portion of the wealth from the nation’s unprecedented mining boom be doled out to its impoverished rural residents.
As we’ve seen in so much of the developing world, that just hasn’t been the case.
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