23rd Edition – Millenium – Pike & Hurricane

Witch Hunts and Violence in Papua New Guinea – A Millenary Belief System

Alexandra Bußler — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 11:44:41 +0000

The witch, whose mouth is stuffed with dirty rags so that she can only utter suffocated screams, is strapped to a wooden pole upside down, naked, and eyes bandaged. She is encompassed by a circle of people from her village, people she knows. Probably even her closest family members and friends are among them. A group of men armed with bush knives pile wooden branches around her. The scene gets showered with gasoline, and then she is burnt, alive. The silent crowd stands and watches; some will even film this atrocity with their mobile phones and later share it on the social media.

If it was not for the details of the mobile phone and the gasoline, the episode could be mistaken for a witch killing practiced during the period of Early Modernity in Europe or the colonized Americas. Except it is 2013, in a slum of Mount Hagen, the capital of Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) mountainous province Western Highlands having about 46.256 inhabitants. The ‘witch’ was a 20-year-old woman, Kepari Leniata, accused of inducing the death of a 6-year-old neighbour boy. Later, authorities found out he had died due to an infectious disease. The video of her execution made an impact on worldwide media, attracting attention to this millennia-old tradition that still persists in fast-developing PNG.

A long tradition and historical legacy

This form of communitarian violence against alleged witches – mostly old, single women, but recently also men and young women – has been part of PNG culture over the last ten thousands of years and remains widely accepted in the present day. Women being the major victims of the sorcery-related violence only seem to be an extension of the physical or sexual violence against women that is not uncommon in PNG: for instance, according to the UN, around 80% of men on the island of Bougainville admitted to doing so in 2013.

The majority of the several hundreds of ethnic groups of this island-state, speaking more than 800 different languages, lived under Palaeolithic conditions in tribal communities until the first contacts with the outside world in the 1930s. Still today, about 90% of the population lives in the remote mountains in traditional rural and agricultural-based communities. These communities’ cultural belief system is established around revenge, voodoo craft and magic – both good and bad. The vast majority (around 95%) of Papua New Guinean’s in fact believe in witchcraft. All premature deaths or misery that cannot be explained by natural reasons is attributed to the intervention of an evil agent of the community, a ‘sanguma’, who conducts black magic, ‘puri puri’. And this ‘witch’ has to be identified, punished and expulsed in order to cleanse the society from all evil forces. For this purpose, ‘witch doctors’ are called and paid to find the culprits, and ‘witch hunters’ will even go and hunt them like prey. It somehow reminds of the medieval religious Inquisitions counting on the societal support to carry out the witch trial.

Challenges of development

The former Minister of Community Development, Dame Karol Kidu, claims that one of the biggest challenges of modern PNG is to keep the best of its old traditions while adopting the best of the new culture. But how to combine ancient sorcery and mystical beliefs with the arrival of modernity that has been taking place over the last decades, and entails many phenomena formerly unknown by the islanders? While agriculture provides income for about 85% of the population, the country’s economic growth has been astonishing. The oil, mining and, especially the recently discovered, natural gas sectors, exploited by foreign firms, are booming thanks to exports to the buoyant Asian markets. This sustaining economic development has brought with it a fast and uncontrolled urban development. This urges urban job creation, which the PNG authorities are struggling with. Ever since the implementation of rural education programmes, educated youth increasingly migrate to urban centres in the search of employment, often ending up in informal dwellings around the cities. Around 40% of the approximate 345.000 inhabitants of the capital Port Moresby live under such conditions. Together with worrying urban youth unemployment rates of about 70%, it has been a fertile soil for despair and alcoholism channelling into the emergence of street gangs and increasing forms of violence, often against women. Port Moresby was even assessed to be the third most dangerous city in the world in 2013, according to the Economist. Despite all economic development, the inequality between rural and urban areas is increasing. The access to modern technologies and the Internet for those in the cities has triggered the emergence of a form of social jealousy between the townsfolk and the ones felt left behind. This has led to a spread of ‘witch’ attacks from the remote rural areas to the cities, such as the case of Lepara in Mount Hagen. According to Dame Karol Kidu, this can be explained by the cultural hodgepodge between old spiritual beliefs and the values from a new age of consumption, technology and urban development.

The fact is that ‘witch hunting’ has recently made a disturbing comeback. PNG authorities estimate conservatively that more than 150 women every year are tortured and burned to death from accusations of sorcery, while NGOs claim that over 200 would be a more realistic figure. However, nobody really seems to know the magnitude of this phenomenon.

Legislation and the political will

According to a 2015 study by the Australian National University, PNG’s legal system has possessed, since 2013, (controversial) laws putting violent acts related to sorcery under death penalty. Despite the legal grounds to persecute such violence, the lack of legal enforcement results in a majority of cases that either remain undiscovered or unpunished. Executive authorities with insufficient funding are often cut-off from the affected areas – the police forces sometimes even lack the funds to pay the gas to reach remote mountain areas. Furthermore, the social community seems to accept the ‘witch hunting’. This is why most of the alleged ‘witches’ are judged by arbitrary community trials following cruel tribal laws. The fact that entire villages are involved in these criminal acts makes it hard for police forces to identify the culprits. Thus, who is finally to blame? The actual executers often hide in the remoteness of the mountains and provide mutual protection to evade legal persecution.

The government is hence urged to find a solution to reach farther into the remote rural areas and their communities to fight this ever-increasing reappearance of this systematic form of cultural violence. However, it is questionable if such general belief systems can be eradicated by a top-down approach in the form of state legislation. PNG’s government has repeatedly been accused of failing to correctly address this issue. What is more, international NGOs such as Amnesty international or Oxfam are predominantly involved in local preventative interventions and have been major actors in pushing legal reforms and policies.

According to representatives of the Missionary Association of PNG (MAPANG), it seems that Christian reformism has also made an important impact on the mind-set of the population by overcoming culpability and revenge practices. Christianity arrived in PNG over 100 years ago and an astonishing 96% of the inhabitants perceive themselves as Christians – even if it appears that their beliefs adhere to mysticism, cosmology and supernatural powers.

Is it not ironic that the institutions that formerly practiced witch hunting and exorcism in PNG are the very same ones that today try to fight these practices?

Today, Monica Paulus, an alleged witch who managed to escape her execution, independently works in the Highlands Region and links authorities, NGOs and the victims of sorcery-related- violence. She claims that another implication of the recent legal reforms is ”now the perpetrators will fear that they might be sentenced to death and will do everything to eliminate all the witnesses to their crimes, including those people who help the survivors.”

Finally, it may be said that only a multiple-stakeholders approach could bring satisfactory results, according to Kate Schuetze, Amnesty International’s Pacific Researcher: “Papua New Guinea’s authorities must once and for all bring a halt to attacks against alleged ‘sorcerers’ and systemic violence against women. This should include addressing the root causes of these attacks through education and working closely with civil society, as well as taking immediate measures such as establishing shelters for women escaping violence.”

By Alexandra Bussler

Image Credit:

Picture 1: Taro Tyler, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Picture 2: The Commonwealth Secretariat, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Picture 3: The Blackthorn Orphans, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Abolitionists, Suffragettes, Feminists: The Story of a Bill

Michael Schätzlein — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 11:43:21 +0000

When the Treasury of the United States of America announced that the $10 bill was deemed too easy to counterfeit back in 2012, the officials likely didn’t expect that the decision to put a woman on the face of the $10 bill would spark such a big debate among American society. Four years later, the decision on whom to put on the new bill still has not been taken, due to the sheer amount of comments on the matter. It would be the first woman to grace a dollar bill in more than a hundred years. Previously, Martha Washington, the wife of the well-known founding father, had made a short appearance on $1 silver certificates. There are huge divides between the various camps, allowing an insight into the American soul.

The move by the Obama administration is seen as one acknowledging the empowerment of women. As a result, a lot of the potential candidates discussed by the public are not scientists or authors like in many other states around the planet, but those promoting equality. In the feminist camp, the suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and the women’s rights pioneers Betty Friedan and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are in high currency. Others favour Eleanor Roosevelt, the late First Lady and stateswoman who dedicated her life to the advancement of human rights.

Harriet Tubman

However, not everyone agrees with these proposals. Especially among black rights activists, it is paramount that the person not only be a woman, but also black, as a recognition of the black community’s struggle. Many different names come to mind, the most prominent being Rosa Parks, the woman who refused to stand up for a white man on the bus, making her one of the idols of the black rights movement. Other candidates put forward by this camp are Harriet Tubman, abolitionist and founder of the Underground Railroad during the American Civil War; Fannie Lou Hamer, who fought for black voting rights in the 1960s; and Sojourner Truth, a suffragist and abolitionist.

The person currently on the $10-dollar bill is Alexander Hamilton, creator of the American financial system and one of the most prominent founding fathers of the nation, but there’s a catch. Where he is popular, the person on the $20 bill, President Andrew Jackson, is not. Jackson has a heinous past of owning hundreds of slaves and waging war on Native American populations.

The most contentious issue, however, is not necessarily who to put on the new bill, but if whoever is selected should grace the new $10 bill at all. The $10 bill does not have a very high value in relation to other bills, and it is also not very common, as most ATMs dispense $20 bills instead. People argue that putting a woman on this bill would depreciate women. As a result, many people favour postponing the new issue of $10 bills and putting the $10 candidate on the $20 bill instead to replace someone unworthy rather than President Hamilton on the $10.

The most high-profile proponent of this measure is the Women on 20s campaign. The movement demands that both a woman to be put on the $20 bill and vignettes of suffragettes be put on the opposite side of Mr. Hamilton’s $10 bill. In an online poll with more than 600,000 participants, the campaign elected Harriet Tubman as a favourite, winning over Eleanor Roosevelt by 15,000 votes.

Indeed, the USA are far behind other countries when it comes to featuring women on notes. Both of its neighbours, Canada and Mexico, already have women on their bills. The same applies to almost all Western countries. Australia has taken it a step further and features a woman on either the back or the front of its notes. Even socially conservative countries such as Syria and Turkey are more advanced in this than the United States.

Jeb Bush would opt for Margaret Thatcher.

In politics, however, the question has been ignored or does not seem to play an important role. Indeed, when asked about who should be on the new bill at a Republican primary election debate, only about half of the presidential candidates could give a valid answer. A few opted for their mothers or daughters, some for foreigners, one even proposed to have no person at all on the new bill, discounting the move as a nonpartisan “gesture.” The issue threatens to become a national embarrassment, a failed PR stunt by the current Obama administration complicated even further by its failure to decide on the question before the 2015 deadline ran out.

In any case, even if a decision on the matter is taken in the near future, we will not see the bill in circulation anytime soon. Each new bill requires long development and rigorous tests in order to prevent counterfeiting. Further, as a result of a recent court decision, the new bill will also feature a raised tactile texture in order to allow blind people to identify the bill’s value. This further complicates the development of the new bill.

What remains is a debate around a subject that goes to the very heart of America. The festering wounds of continuous oppression, both of women and African Americans, that are revealed in the process make clear that the United States is still haunted by the spectres of days past, and that it will take a long time until these issues are finally addressed appropriately. The introduction of a symbol that is intended to make up for past wrongdoings, then, is only a small step on the road of redemption.

Photo credits:

Picture 1: Maryland GovPics, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Picture 2: Quinn Dombrowski, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

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Drones: A Foreign Policy Game-changer?

Yaroslav Mikhaylov — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 08:14:47 +0000

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), colloquially known as drones, have existed since the mid-20^th century but have really entered the public spotlight with the September 11^th terrorist attacks and the start of the War on Terror. Coming in different shapes and sizes, modern military UAVs are the result of decades of technical and doctrinal development that promised to change the nature of how states conduct war and foreign policy. While many promises made by proponents of drone warfare have indeed come to fruition, drones still have many drawbacks both as military and political instruments. So just how has the rise of unmanned aerial vehicles changed world politics?

The basic definition of an unmanned aerial vehicle is any aircraft that can take off, fly and land without a person on board. This definition is very broad, but necessarily so, since military drones can range from a 400-gram Wasp surveillance drone to an enormous RQ-4 Global Hawk that weighs 15 tons and has the wingspan of a Boeing 757, with the most well known ones – the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper – falling somewhere in the middle. Most military UAVs are made by American companies and used by American militaries or their allies. However, in recent years, many nations have begun either developing their own combat drones or purchasing them from other nations. Most drone exports come from the United States, but Israel and China also hold considerable share of the market. Chinese drones specifically have become very popular thanks to their low price and loose export regulations.

The experiences of both the first Gulf War and the interventions in former Yugoslavia and Africa revealed the possibilities offered by air power, smart munitions and superior reconnaissance in modern warfare. However, these same experiences also exposed the difficulty of sustaining public support for military operations abroad in the post-Cold War world. UAVs were the synthesis of those two experiences. They could provide intelligence and remote strike abilities without the possibility of politically problematic combat deaths. These capabilities became especially important given the increase in intrastate and asymmetrical conflicts in the 90’s and the 2000’s.

The biggest advantage of using UAVs for intelligence gathering and military attacks is obvious – there are no live humans exposed to battlefield dangers. Operations carried out using manned aircraft or on-the-ground agents can result in soldiers dying or being captured by the enemy. That can be difficult to explain to the voters at home. Even worse, it can result in a serious diplomatic incident if the mission is being carried out on the territory of a neutral or ostensibly friendly nation. For these reasons, drones have been the weapon of choice for the United States in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen. And because drones are remotely operated, they can remain in position for 12 or more hours – much longer than manned aircraft – since their pilots can easily hand over the controls to a colleague.

But if UAVs are so effective and do not place the lives of pilots and operatives at risk, it begs the question as to why have regular manned aerial strike or intelligence capabilities at all. It turns out that, for all of their upsides, drones have major technical and political downsides. For one, they tend to fall out of the sky for little reason. The United States Air Force has reported significant reliability issues with their fleet of drones and, in 2013, a US Army report stated that its drones crashed at nearly ten times the rate of manned aircraft. And while much of it can be attributed to mechanical issues, especially issues with the connection between a drone and its controller, many other accidents are the result of human error. Drone Wars UK’s Drone Crash Database is dominated with entries labelled “Pilot Error” where the drone’s controller accidentally steered it into mountains, shipping containers and once even a C-130 cargo plane. This is not surprising considering that UAV pilots spend over three times longer “in the air” than their manned aircraft counterparts. And in the American drone pilot corps at least, this problem is getting worse with 240 pilots leaving the job and only 180 new replacements arriving in 2014. Among reasons for leaving, the retiring operators cite long hours, fatigue and the general high-stress work atmosphere.

These are, however, hardly the only problems with military use of UAVs. For over a decade now, human rights groups have criticised drone strikes for causing unnecessary civilian casualties. This has been doubly problematic when UAVs have been used in ‘gray area’ conflicts like those in Pakistan or Yemen since these attacks are outside of normal wartime regulations. Finally, drones have proven, due to their low speed, very vulnerable when their targets are equipped with anti-air weaponry. This has recently been demonstrated by the loss of an American Predator drone to Syrian air defences and the shooting down of a UAE drone over Yemen during the conflict there. This limits drones’ effectiveness to areas where friendly forces can guarantee them safe skies.

Even in those nations that provide freedom of movement for other nations’ UAVs or host drone operators, the support for drone warfare is rarely unanimous. Opposition groups and civil rights organizations in places that host American drones or their pilots, like Germany and Italy, regularly decry their nations’ complicity in what they criticise as illegal attacks. And in nations where drone strikes are being carried out, like Pakistan or Yemen, popular anger against the strikes has been directed against their leaders. Pakistan’s government continues to suffer from instability, especially in the country’s north-west, while Yemen’s government was overthrown, plunging the country into civil war.

So what are the foreign policy implications of drone warfare? In a realist sense, they reinforce the advantage wealthier and more developed nations hold over smaller and less developed nations, since UAVs allow the former to carry out surveillance and military intervention against the latter at little cost. However, because combat drones are very vulnerable and rely on their targets’ lack of ability or political will to deploy air defences against them, this limits their effectiveness in interstate warfare. Since all but the weakest of states possess some form of air defence, the only enemies against which drones are effective are non-state actors without air defence capabilities. Likewise, the need for friendly skies and bases in the region of operations require a significant level of interstate cooperation to make drone use possible anywhere significantly beyond national borders. This gives less-powerful states in strategically-important positions, like Turkey or Pakistan, increased leverage over their great power allies, since without their consent, whether implicit or explicit, UAV operations through out their territory would be impossible.

The increased sophistication and frequency of use of UAVs was supposed to change how states conducted their foreign and security policies, but after a decade of experience, the changes wrought by drone warfare seem far more evolutionary than revolutionary. Rather than reducing the manpower requirements of modern militaries, drone operations have increased them and, rather than reduce the impact of public opinion on military operations, drone strikes have caused considerable opposition both at home and abroad. For realists, UAVs do little to alter the existing balance of power, while proponents of a more cooperative foreign policy use the requirements of drone warfare as yet another point in favour of the policies they already espoused. In short, drones have become just another tool in the security policy toolbox rather than the paradigm-changing super-weapons they were hyped up to be.

By Yaroslav Mikhaylov

Image Credit:

Cover: Gerald L. Nino, United States Customs and Border Protection, in public domain.

Image 1: Staffan Vilcans, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Image 2: Staff Sgt. John Bainter, United States Air Force, in public domain.

Image 3: Sgt. David Hodge, U.S. Army, in public domain.

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Missing Yet Another Chance

Céline Sonnenberg — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 08:12:14 +0000

When I heard about the mass sexual assaults on New Year´s Eve in Cologne, I was shocked, I was appalled, but, to be honest, I was not surprised. While much of the debate around the assaults has been along the lines of “How could something like this ever happen in Germany?” For me, and most other women, the equation anonymous large crowds + alcohol + men = possible sexual harassment made sense before Cologne and has been internalised by us long before the binomial formulas.

While the very organised way in which the attacks in Cologne took place may have added a shocking and frightening new character, being aware of large groups of men and feeling uncomfortable when surrounded by them is sadly not new at all for many women. Or as Anne Wizorek, part of the new outspoken generation of feminists in Germany puts it: “When large groups of men come together and alcohol is involved, women are often the subject of harassment. That happens in football stadiums, during Karneval in Cologne or at Oktoberfest in Munich.”

What made the aftermath of the incidents in Cologne stand out was the reaction to it. Except for the convenient and easily manageable tip by the mayor of Cologne to always keep men at arm´s length, there was very little victim blaming and a lot of support for the victims with many politicians speaking up against this sexual violence.

However, this time, the alleged rapists and assaulters were North-African men, which lead to many arguing that these violent acts were part of their culture, the dangerous belief system around Islam and the misogynistic practices of the “orient.” Pointing fingers after Cologne was easier than in other cases because there was no need to point at oneself.

This time speaking up for the victims could conveniently be paired with racist propaganda and that called surprising new advocates for women´s rights onto the stage. For example Horst Seehofer, prime minister of Bavaria and head of the conservative Christian Social Union, called the assaults in Cologne “disgusting” and was quick to call for harder punishment of migrants who violate the law.

Ironically, Seehofer did not seem to think sexual violence needed to be punished when he voted against classifying rape in marriage as a crime in 1997.

The general huge interest in sexual violence baffled me. I have rarely met men, who thought of the fight against sexual violence on the top of their agenda. Many men I talked to after the attacks in Cologne thought that this kind of behaviour had long vanished from the German public and was only done by horrible, horrible people in horrible, horrible places. Thus, the events in Cologne could only be explained by the different background of the aggressors and the backward thinking of Muslims.

The rhetoric of stigmatisation and racism against the Muslim men in the great tradition of Orientalism and the age-old racist story of having to protect your women against the strangers who will steal (or in this case harass) them, falls on fruitful ground, when talking about sexual violence has been a taboo for so long.

I truly believe that for many men, the fear of being sexually harassed is not a daily thought. Most men do not have to watch out for their bodies from the innocent age of 11, or have to take inventive and often round-about ways of getting home after parties. Most men are not incredibly conscious about their surroundings whenever they are out and about and most men do not know the feeling of your heart pounding whenever someone walks behind you on a sidewalk at night, while these scenarios are a reality in the daily life of many women. And maybe this unawareness of sexual assault and the former silence about this topic in the media makes so many of the racist allegations after Cologne so easily accepted.

Most men have never been made aware of the reality of sexual assault against women in Germany even -dare I say it- by German men, which makes it even easier to simply blame a different culture, a different belief system! The system behind rape culture, where there is an intense focus on the victim (What was she wearing? Was she drinking?), as well as the huge stigma and difficulty for victims of sexual violence to speak up, banishes the entire topic into a dark back room, far away from open debate.

And thus the events in Cologne were often described by politicians and the media as a shocking new step back to barbaric practices of sexual violence
brought into our secure Christian, occidental countries by dangerous Muslim, oriental migrants. The fact that there is still a huge problem with sexual violence in Germany with 58% of women in Germany saying they have experienced sexual harassment, and 40% having suffered physical or sexual violence from a partner (who are very unlikely to all have middle eastern husband) is being ignored in favour of a racist discourse. As Wizorek points out: “(… ) the core problem is not Islam, it is patriarchy. Perpetrators clearly need to be punished, but the problem of sexualized violence has already existed here for some time and can’t simply be “deported”.”

Conservative politicians speaking up for women´s rights would be wonderful if it would not only be done as part of a anti-migration rhetoric. The attacks of Cologne added even more fuel to the fire of hatred and anxiety towards refugees that is burning in Europe and we can already see first developments that stem from the propaganda around Cologne. Refugees who break the law are now to be send back to their home countries quicker and easier, even though it has become evident that only three of the 58 arrested suspects are recent asylum seekers from Syria and Iraq.

While the attacks have been used to further declare migrants and refugees as threats to our safety, little is being done about the underlying misogynistic practices that allow for such sexual violence to occur. There are neither additional programmes to help victims of sexual assault speak up nor a new discussion about sexual violence within Germany.

The victims of this whole discourse are the refugees and migrants, who never planned on breaking German laws and more than anything the women, who were assaulted in Cologne. They were not only grossly violated, but are now used simply as tools in racist propaganda they may have never agreed to. Using the attacks only as a way to further discriminate refugees and widen the gap between “us” and “them,” Germany has missed yet another chance to finally open up a debate about misogyny and sexual violence while finding efficient ways to counter them.

By Céline Sonnenberg

Image Credit:

Picture 1: Jacob Surland licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Picture 2: Chase Carter licensed underCC BY-ND 2.0

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