Minister of Papua New Guinea Peter O'Neill has condemned the tragic loss of life that has occurred in the series of terror-related incidents in France over recent days. He has further conveyed heartfelt sympathy on behalf of the people of Papua New Guinea to the people of France at this difficult time. "We are shocked and saddened by the attack that occurred in Paris on Wednesday that was followed by hostage situations overnight," O'Neill said. "In a world that today seems so full of violence, the thoughts and prayers of Papua New Guineans are with the families of the victims of these attacks, and with the French people at this time of distress and deep sadness." The Prime Minister said the attack at the start of the crisis on the office of the magazine Charlie Hebdo was particularly alarming and had deep implications for freedom of expression around the world. "I know our media fraternity in Papua New Guinea will be acutely aware of this horrific attack, and will lament the tragic loss of their international colleagues. "Free speech underpins our way of life in free countries. "These are terrible and callous acts of violence and we hope that perpetrators who remain at large are brought to justice as soon as is possible."
Photo: Peter O'Neill initially welcomed the public prosecutor's request for a Leadership Tribunal. (ABC)
A court in Papua New Guinea has postponed a tribunal into alleged misconduct by prime minister Peter O'Neill until after the Supreme Court rules on whether the correct steps were taken to set up the tribunal.
Mr O'Neill, who was due to face a leadership tribunal on January 26, is accused of bypassing proper procedures to secure a $1.3 billion loan from UBS bank to buy Oil Search shares for the PNG government.
The prime minister denies any wrongdoing.
His legal team, led by Queensland QC Mal Varitimos, argued that the public prosecutor exceeded his powers in the way he referred the matter for tribunal and therefore the tribunal has no jurisdiction.
"I conclude that, yes, the questions should be referred to the Supreme Court," Justice David Cannings said.
"Indeed I am obliged to refer them."
A leadership tribunal is an ad hoc body that has the power to dismiss, suspend or fine leaders found guilty of misconduct.
Several members of parliament were referred to leadership tribunals without challenge last year.
In Mr O'Neill's case, the public prosecutor requested more information from the ombudsman and subsequently changed the allegations of misconduct.
Justice Cannings ordered an interim injunction on the tribunal while the Supreme Court considers whether the public prosecutor's actions were constitutional.
"The sitting of the second defendant [the retired Australian, New Zealand and PNG judges on the leadership tribunal] scheduled for 26 January 2015 at 9.30am is vacated," Justice Cannings said
The leadership tribunal is separate to accusations of official corruption against the prime minister.
Mr O'Neill was served with an arrest warrant in June in relation to a fraud case by the country's anti-corruption body.
He is also challenging those allegations in court.
The former Australian colony of Papua New Guinea has become an increasingly important ally for Canberra, hosting the Manus Island asylum seeker detention centre and receiving $517 million in aid this year.
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.
A Singaporean businessman was found dead at his home in Papua New Guinea on Sunday - and police there believe he may have been murdered.
Mr Tan Tiam Teng, 69, managing director of Morobe Stationery, was discovered with a wound to his neck.
It is believed he could have been attacked with a sharp object and left to bleed to death.
On Tuesday night, his son, Mr Tan Sio Wei, left Singapore for Papua New Guinea and was scheduled to arrive in Lae on Wednesday to identify his body.
He was informed about the death on Sunday and told The Straits Times: "Police said he could have been murdered, that's why I can't comment on the case."
The Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it was aware of the case and is in touch with the deceased's family.
Mr Tan, a businessman based in Singapore, said he and his three sisters are keeping the news from their elderly mother.
The late Mr Tan was supposed to travel to the country's capital, Port Moresby, on Sunday afternoon.
He was discovered dead by his driver, who called the police after noticing that the fly-wire mesh covering the back door to his apartment had been ripped off.
Police had difficulty entering the house and a locksmith was called to open the door.
They told reporters that the deceased was home alone when he was attacked from behind with a sharp object and left to bleed to death.
Mr Tan said his father lived with an employee who was apparently not at home when the attack took place.
Mr Tan said his father had been based in Papua New Guinea for more than 20 years, though his family remained in Singapore.
He lived in a high-security residential area in Hibiscus Avenue in Eriku, a suburb in the industrial city of Lae.
His company - which supplies school and office stationery, sports equipment, trophies and furniture - was also located in Lae, in Morobe Province.
The incident is one of five killings in the city this year, including the shooting of a woman on New Year's Day.
Belief in sorcery is common and longstanding across Papua New Guinea, especially amongst the 80 percent of the seven-million-strong country who still live in rural villages.
In 1971, rather than combat or deny these beliefs, the local government passed the Sorcery Act legalising "white" (good) magic and criminalising "black" (harmful) witchcraft to encourage locals to resolve their disputes with alleged sorcerers in court rather than via ad hoc accused lynch mobs.
The director of the local Melanesian Institute , a cultural research center helping churches, governments, and non-governmental organizations understand and react to regional needs, Zocca has spent much of the past few decades researching and writing extensively on sorcery in rural Papuan society.
Over a spotty phone line, Zocca held forth on the role of economic displacement, cultural shifts, and weak governance in seeding and spreading the current witchcraft-related killings and migrations.
VICE: Why are sorcery killings getting so common and violent in Papua New Guinea? Father Franco Zocca: When you say sorcery-related killings, people—95 percent—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.
The problem of this physical killing of the sorcerers is most prominent in the highlands, especially in Simbu among the Kuman speakers . In the other highlands [this violent torture killing wasn't as practiced], but this pattern now is spreading because the Simbu people... because of the poverty of their region, they are spreading around and they are bringing that pattern of accusation, torture, and killing that they did for centuries in their own places.
Some anthropologists, they think that in the past people tended to accuse the spirit of the ancestors. They say that now modern education and missionaries have taken away the fear of the ancestors so now (because the people are not satisfied with knowing the natural causes of sickness) they tend to accuse human beings—living people.
[In] many cases people are using this mentality to get rid of people they want to get rid [of]. People, they wanted to punish them for some reason and then they accuse them of sorcery.
So part of it has to do with the migration of particular groups that have a history of this style of killing, and part of it has to do with people who just want to settle vendettas? Yes. Also in our research into the cases that appeared over those last six years, we found that even if accusations happened in, say, Port Moresby [the capital], Simbu people were very important [in them]. The accused have to leave and now they're living in settlements there.
One former bishop who was for 50 years a Catholic bishop in Simbu—he reckoned that one-third of the population of Simbu is displaced because of accusations or fears of sorcery. So you find those people in the settlements everywhere and they still keep that kind of mindset.
Some people thinkthe increased violence in the murders has more to do with the spread of drugs and home brew [moonshine] than economic displacement. Do you think there's any truth to that?The accusation comes from elders usually, but the violence is always done by young people—sometimes under the influence of alcohol or marijuana or something like that. There is no work for them. Every year tens of thousands of people are kicked out of the system because it is very selective. Many people, they don't go to school, and even those who finish don't find a job. So there is a lot of frustration. These people are using something that wasn't around in the past—marijuana or alcohol were not around in the past, you know.
Some reports say these aren't ad hoc killings any more, but that these young people are now permanent witch hunting gangs. Is that true? It could be, but in my research I didn't really find gangs going out and killing the sorcerers, because they're always people from the home of the accused. For the police, a part of [the problem] is they are afraid to deal with sorcery. But apart form that there are no witnesses. Nobody wants to talk. It's very much the locals who are doing it with the collusion of the whole community.
You say this is displacing a lot of people. What will happen to these communities when a third of the population is running from sorcery accusations? There are consequences. In the villages we really suffer now from the lack of leaders. The leaders in the highlands in the past, they were warriors. Tribal fighters have diminished during the years. But there is also a lack of leaders because the ones who are clever, they used to move to town... [in part] because they are afraid to be struck [by sorcery]. They always say this sorcery is triggered by jealousy—envy. So if you become too successful, you're in danger to be struck by the sorcerer. In the highlands, this fear is paralysing the economy.
The government has tried to deter witch-hunts by repealing the 1976 Sorcery Act, which witch hunters used to defend their actions in court, and by reinstating capital punishment [out of use since 1954]. But it doesn't seem to be having a great effect... The government, yeah, they repealed the law under the pressure of the international media, but without much conviction. You cannot change a cultural mentality like that just by repealing a law. To change the mentality—to accept natural causes of death over spiritual ones—would stop this. It happened also in Europe. We killed lots of witches in the Middle Ages, and then finally we accepted the natural causes of sickness and death. Then witch hunting stopped.
In the case of Europe, it took many, many years and gradual change for people to stop hunting witches. But in a place like Papua New Guinea it seems like there's a lot of damage that could happen if people just leave it to sort itself out over that long. Exactly, and that's why the churches have to stop giving credit to this kind of thing, because that's part of the problem. They are people possessed by evil spirits. They say things like that. The people possessed in the time of Jesus, they were sick people. That was a way of explaining sickness, but we still find a lot of churches today that enforce those kinds of beliefs.
For me, it's more a matter of education than other things.
What do you think is the best hope for bringing education like that out to remote regions? Increase the education and bring a good health system. Our health is terrible here, especially in the villages. A lot of med centers are closed down. No doctors want to serve in the rural areas. The government is happy, because instead of accusing the system, [people] are accusing each other.
What would make it easier for police to intervene, or for people to report witch hunts to help solve this in the short-term? We don't have many policemen. We only have 7,000 for the whole country. In my research, in [one area] in Simbu, there was only one policeman for those cases of sorcery. They don't have cars. They don't have fuel. Often they are people from the same region. They are themselves very, very afraid of sorcery.
My team here, the local research team, they always refuse to interview the sorcerers—the old ladies who survive—because they are afraid too.
InterOil (NYSE:IOC) reached a new 52-week low during trading on Wednesday , Stock Ratings News reports.
The stock traded as low as $42.63 and last traded at $42.97, with a volume of 461,196 shares changing hands. The stock had previously closed at $44.52.
A number of analysts have recently weighed in on IOC shares.
Analysts at Zacks upgraded shares of InterOil from a “neutral” rating to an “outperform” rating in a research note on Wednesday, December 24.
They now have a $54.10 price target on the stock. Separately, analysts at Goldman Sachs initiated coverage on shares of InterOil in a research note on Thursday, December 18.
They set a “buy” rating and a $69.50 price target on the stock.
One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating and four have issued a buy rating to the stock.
InterOil presently has a consensus rating of “Buy” and an average target price of $70.90.
The stock has a 50-day moving average of $52.34 and a 200-day moving average of $55.93.
The company has a market cap of $2.120 billion and a price-to-earnings ratio of 6.71.
InterOil (NYSE:IOC) last released its earnings data on Friday, November 14.
The company reported ($0.34) EPS for the quarter, beating the Thomson Reuters consensus estimate of ($0.51) by $0.17.
The company had revenue of $10.75 million for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $308.00 million.
During the same quarter in the prior year, the company posted ($0.13) earnings per share.
The company’s quarterly revenue was down 98.3% on a year-over-year basis. Analysts expect that InterOil will post $-1.62 EPS for the current fiscal year.
InterOil Corporation (NYSE:IOC) is an integrated energy company operating in Papua New Guinea and the surrounding Southwest Pacific region.
Every minute, a child dies from malaria in Africa and with malaria parasites resistant to traditional treatments, a new finding by a researcher from Papua New Guinea - where malaria is also a serious concern - is good news.
Dr Moses Laman, who has been undertaking a PhD at The University of Western Australia, is the lead author of a study published in the prestigious journal PLoS Medicine. The study - which is the main topic of his thesis - outlines an important clinical trial of a new combination treatment for malaria.
Dr Laman said since malaria parasites developed resistance to chloroquine years ago, the race had been on to find new ways of beating the disease. Combination treatments using artemisinin (originally extracted from the wormwood plant) or its derivatives and longer-acting chloroquine-like drugs such as piperaquine or lumefantrine had been found to be effective but not 100 per cent so.
Dr Laman said in PNG and in many other countries there were different types of malaria, which further complicated treatment regimes. The most dangerous form was falciparum while the least dangerous was vivax. Both affected children, who bore the brunt of the disease.
Dr Laman said he and his colleagues, including his supervisor Professor Tim Davis, decided to test the efficacy of the currently recommended treatment, artemether-lumefantrine, against that of the novel combination artemisinin-naphthoquine. They recruited 250 PNG children aged from six months to five years who had fevers related to one or other kinds of malaria but did not have serious symptoms.
Half of the children were given artemisinin-naphthoquine, but the researchers ignored the manufacturer's guidelines which suggested using it in a single one-day dose and instead gave it over three days as recommended by WHO, while closely monitoring the children's health and following up on their progress six months later.
They found that artemisinin-naphthoquine over three days was not only safe but was a far better treatment than artemether-lumefantrine for vivax malaria, with 100 per cent of the children free of infection after treatment. The researchers also found it was as good as artemether-lumefantrine for the potentially deadly falciparum malaria.
Dr Laman was supported by an AusAid scholarship and the trial was funded through an NHMRC project grant.
"Dr Laman has an impressive CV (including a Third World Academy of Science young affiliate award) and his work is an excellent example of a longstanding and productive collaboration between UWA School of Medicine and Pharmacology and the PNG Institute of Medical Research," Professor Davis said.
Media references
Dr Moses Laman (UWA School of Medicine and Pharmacology, Fremantle Unit) (+61 4) 98 648 430
Professor Tim Davis (Head, UWA School of Medicine and Pharmacology, Fremantle Unit) (+61 8) 9431 3229 David Stacey (UWA Media Manager) (+61 8) 6488 3229 / (+61 4) 32 637 716
