BEIJING — “They’re going to cook the sanguma”, or witchcraft, “mama!”
This terrifying cry by Papua New Guinean children opens “It’s 2013, and They’re Burning ‘Witches’,” a long and eloquent report in The Global Mail, an Australia-based online news site.
It was published last week before news shot around the world on Tuesday that the police in Papua New Guinea, in another case, had charged two people with torturing and killing a 20-year-old mother, Kepari Leniata, whom they accused of being a witch. Ms. Leniata was “stripped, tortured with a hot iron rod, doused in gasoline and set alight on a pile of car tires and trash” earlier this month in front of a crowd of hundreds of people, including young children, The Associated Press reported.
Why?
“Leniata had been accused of sorcery by relatives of a 6-year-old boy who had died in a hospital. Ware and Watea are believed to be the boy’s mother and uncle, police said in a statement,” The A.P. reported.
The year 2013 or not, such violence against women is not that uncommon in Papua New Guinea, where “witches” (in reality just women, often older ones) may be blamed when things go wrong, a reflection of the powerful belief in sorcery in the Pacific nation just north of Australia. A key reason for identifying a woman as a witch and attacking her is when a man, or child, dies unexpectedly.
But there may be other reasons. As the Australian international television station Australia Network reported, in a resource-rich country undergoing a boom, accusing her of being a witch is an easy way to take her land.
Dame Carol Kidu, a Papua New Guinean politician, told the station: “There are other things involved nowadays, like greed, acquisition of people’s properties and land, and all sorts of things might be all tied up in all of this, using – killing the sorcerers as a reason to acquire land. So it needs to be investigated and we need to work out how we can deal with it. It is a very complex issue.”
The United Nations also found that accusations of sorcery can be used to kill women for a range of motives: “The U.N. Human Rights agency says they’ve seen an increase in these types of killings as well as torture and rape. They say the accusations are often used to deprive women of land and property,” U.N. radio reported recently.
What lies behind the ferocity? Traditional beliefs, alcohol and drug use among men, and uneven development in a country that is in the middle of a mining boom where, as The Global Mail wrote, “the wealth bypasses the vast majority.”
It writes: “enduring tradition widely resists the notion that natural causes, disease, accident or recklessness might be responsible for a death. Rather, bad magic is the certain culprit.”
The dead person if often a man; the culprit is a woman. Or, a “witch.”
“When people die, especially men, people start asking ‘Who’s behind it?’ not ‘What’s behind it?’” said Philip Gibbs, a longtime resident, anthropologist, sorcery specialist and Catholic priest who was quoted by The Global Mail.
But in its report, the news site was careful to point out that while many Papua New Guineans believe in sorcery to some degree, that doesn’t mean they support the lynchings.
“In the words of the editor of the national daily Post Courier, Alexander Rheeney, city and country folk alike overwhelmingly ‘recoil in fear and disgust’ at lynch mobs pursuing payback, and at the kind of extremist cruelty that Sister Gaudentia was about to witness,” it wrote, referring to the “cooking” that the children were shouting about.
That’s Sister Gaudentia, a Swiss nun who tries to save “Angela,” a woman accused of witchcraft in the Global Mail article. The article includes powerful photos of accused “witches” (warning – they are graphic, showing machete injuries or healed, hacked-off limbs.)
Hearing the children shout that a witch was about to be cooked, Sister Gaudentia rushed after them. “Two days earlier, she had tried to rescue Angela (not her real name), an accused witch, when she was first seized by a gang of merciless inquisitors looking for someone to blame for the recent deaths of two young men.”
“Angela” was luckier than Ms. Leniata.
She had no male relatives to protect her (a common profile for accused “witches”) and was horribly tortured, but lived, the article says. A “sorcery survivor,” today she is in hiding with her small son.
“Those victims who lived to tell the tale owe their lives either to individual police members or to a strong church leader who intervened for them,” Mr. Gibbs, the anthropologist and priest, told the Global Mail.
“In effect it means that, if sufficiently motivated to act, the power of the police and civil authorities, or the power of the church, can be enough to defend a person who is otherwise powerless,” he said.
