A Bishop and Caritas against violence in Enga province

“Caritas is not an office, it’s work in the community”, according to Auxiliary Bishop Justin

Ain, currently in charge of the diocese of Wabag, in Enga province, after the untimely death

of Bishop Arnold Orowae on 27 December 2024. According to Bishop Justin, who now also

supervises the agency at the national level, there is no standard work and a single face for

Caritas.

In the case of the diocese of Wabag the focus and the concerns are extremely peculiar. An

alarm sounds for me the day before departing from Port Moresby after Palm Sunday. It may

not be possible to travel to the mining town of Porgera for Easter, as a killing just occurred

just outside the Enga capital town of Wabag. The aggrieved party blocked the road looking

for additional enemies to slaughter. Fortunately, after a quick check it is sufficiently clear

that the transit is safe for anybody not belonging to the clans in conflict.

The culture of tribal fights in the remote Enga province of Papua New Guinea is deeply

rooted. In the old days, when all means were exhausted for the resolution mainly of land

conflicts, the battlefield was the accepted venue for the outcome. The winner would be

proven right and the loser wrong. Rules of engagement were clear and strictly enforced: no

involvement and no victims among children and women, no killings taking place on third

party grounds. The roots of the tribal fight remain deeply emotional. What is done to one

member of the tribe is done to everybody. It is somehow the result of an excess of solidarity

and identification of the individual with the group.

Much more dangerous today, when the wrong is frequently caused by the widespread abuse

of alcohol and substances. What may start as a scuffle over just a word or a punch can

become the cause of multiple deaths and loss of properties regardless of the merit of the

contention. The clan supports its members regardless of the right or wrong of their actions.

Traditional conflicts over land have now given way to disputes over wealth in general and,

connected to it, elections and political power. The world changes but the ancestral attitudes

remain. Defending the honour of the tribe is seen as paramount. Winning a seat in the

Provincial or National Parliament or securing a ministerial position by one rather than the

other candidate brings along immense benefits for the tribe or clan of origin. In Enga

province, contemporary politics and elections are inevitably accompanied by cheating,

harassment, violence, and blood. It is not a matter of spears and arrows anymore, but heavy

firearms, reportedly smuggled mainly from the neighbouring West Papua province of

Indonesia, with dozens of deaths, displacement of families, destruction of gardens. The Paiam suburb of Porgera remains basically a ghost town after a tribal fight erupted in 2020 over the financial benefits related to a communication tower. No more than forty poorly organized people this year attended the Easter rites at the local Catholic parish of Blessed Peter To Rot, once a flourishing community centre.

In the past it was land, pigs, and value in battle that determined the pride of a tribe. Now is

business, education and political position. When I travelled throughout Enga for the first time in 2019, I was only shown a few spots of recent or current tribal fights. Now from the

entrance into the province at Pompabos up to the mining town of Porgera it’s five hours of

travel and about a 150 km distance in an active and life-threatening war zone. Houses, shops,

schools, hospitals, churches have been lost.

It is all a sign of a massive social and cultural breakdown, which is also the root cause of

harrowing sorcery accusation related violence. The first case was registered in 2015 in the

Aiyele Valley. The Melanesian traditional mentality tends to attribute misfortune, sickness

and death to “somebody” rather than “something”. But only in recent years village women in Enga province have been forced into confessing the inexistent through false accusations,

torture and execution. The practice was alive in neighbouring provinces but not part of the

Engan society and way of life. People under the influence of alcohol and substances are

frequently the perpetrators.

In such cases, the Caritas teams on the ground play a key role in sounding the first alarm of

violence in the community. That triggers the immediate reaction at the diocesan level by

direct intervention and alerting of the police and the government authorities. While the tribal violence is hard to control and stops as it erupts, the scenes of sorcery related violence with women being tortured and brutalized, normally offer the possibility of rescue of the victims if still alive, though not completely without risks. They will be immediately hospitalized. A time of recuperation in a safe house will follow. And finally, the reintegration into the village of origin after an adequate preparation of the community, accompanied by a court restraining order preventing anybody from inflicting the same fate to the victim.

“But we have come to realize that we will never stop this behaviour by simply assisting the

victims”, Bishop Justin says. “We have to educate the perpetrators”. That means, for the

Caritas teams, organize sessions with the people in the villages, especially the poorly

educated or totally illiterate youth, on the causes of sickness and death, the consequences of their violent actions on the person and the family, the damage caused by alcohol and addition to intoxicating substances, thus discouraging them from venting their frustration on innocent victims any time in the future. For Catholic communities involved in sorcery accusation related violence, at times the diocese of Wabag applies a suspension from the Sacraments and participation in Church activities, a sort of informal excommunication which will be lifted only after people journey towards understanding and conversion from their wrongdoings.

Bishop Justin recalls the first such initiative by his late predecessor Arnold Orowae in 2019

and the conditions he imposed: pay financial compensation and seek forgiveness and

reconciliation with the families of the victims, attend a three-day Caritas workshop on the

issue, publicly renounce to committing the same crime in the future. The Enga Caritas teams

have set a deadline for the year 2027 to eliminate cases of sorcery related violence in their

province. The declining number of incidents appears to be on their side.

That is encouraging, also because for the next couple of years the focus of Caritas Enga is

expected to be on the upcoming national general elections in May 2027. Enga has six

assigned Members of Parliament elected in five districts and the winner of the gubernatorial

seat. It is well known that the polls in Papua New Guinea and especially in the Highlands

Region are marred by threats, vote buying, and cheating on the counting. “We recently had a supplementary election in the Lagaip District to make up for the failed election of 2022”, says Bishop Justin, “and we changed our approach to voting awareness. Instead of addressing the public, we only invited the leaders of all sectors of society for a three-day political education on leadership, representation, responsibility towards the voters. No incident occurred during the electoral exercise. People look upon the leaders for guidance. You convince the leaders, and you are likely to have everybody on your side doing the right thing”.

The actual issues of violence among people (tribal fights, sorcery, political competition) and

their causes (isolation, ignorance, unemployment, alcoholism) determine the action, the

priorities and the strategies of Caritas Wabag in the Enga province of Papua New Guinea, not an abstract planning from a distant office. (7 May 2025)

Fr. Giorgio Licini

CPNG Advocacy Lead