Category Archives: Papua New Guinea

‘Leave that lady alone’: rugby star’s domestic violence video sparks outcry in Papua New Guinea

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Debbie Kaore who has represented the Pacific nation in rugby and boxing shared a video of alleged attack from partner

A shocking video that appears to show a Papua New Guinean sports star being beaten by her partner has sparked outrage across the country and prompted calls for the government to take urgent action to address high rates of violence against women.

Graphic photographs and a video that appear to show a man repeatedly head-butting a woman and hitting her across the face with a hot clothing iron were widely shared across social media in Papua New Guinea over the weekend, sparking outrage.

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Fears in Papua New Guinea over reports of China Mobile buying major phone carrier Digicel

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Speculation that the beleaguered mobile phone operator will be sold to Chinese telco has sparked security concerns

Speculation that mobile phone operator Digicel is considering selling the Papua New Guinea business that is considered the jewel in the financially troubled empire’s crown has sparked concern within the country over Beijing’s growing influence in PNG.

The Digicel conglomerate, which is controlled by Irish businessman Denis O’Brien, surprised many of its users in PNG by filing bankruptcy proceedings earlier this month in Bermuda and the US, where it owes billions of dollars.

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Papua New Guinea police arrest former PM Peter O’Neill over alleged corruption

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PNG police say O’Neill was arrested over the $14m purchase of two generators allegedly without parliamentary approval

Papua New Guinea police have arrested former prime minister Peter O’Neill over the alleged purchase of generators from Israel without parliamentary approval, according to the country’s assistant police commissioner.

O’Neill was arrested on Saturday at the main airport of Port Moresby, PNG’s capital, after returning from Australia, and brought in for questioning, assistant crimes commissioner Hodges Ette said in a statement.

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Politics and Porgera: why Papua New Guinea cancelled the lease on one of its biggest mines

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The announcement not to renew the goldmine lease is fraught but part of an attempt to ‘take back PNG’

Late in April, in the middle of a global pandemic and slow-boiling domestic economic crisis, the government of Papua New Guinea made the surprising announcement not to extend the mining lease on a goldmine that contributes roughly 10% of the country’s total exports.

The announcement not to renew the special mining lease for the Porgera mine was a shock, not least to the mine’s operator, Barrick Gold, and their joint venture partner Zijin Mining.

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‘We were behind the eight ball’: Papua New Guinea’s health minister on Covid-19

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Jelta Wong had been in the job for just a few months when the coronavirus outbreak reached PNG

When Jelta Wong was appointed as Papua New Guinea’s health minister in November, he knew he had his work cut out for him.

The Pacific nation just north of Australia is dealing with outbreaks of malaria, dengue fever, drug-resistant tuberculosis and had a recent outbreak of polio. Its health system is notoriously fractured and underfunded.

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Thai geologist shot dead in second mining-related killing in Bougainville

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Channon Lumpoo, 27, was shot as he conducted exploration activities for a new gold mine in the region

A Thai geologist working at a new gold mine in Bougainville has been shot dead in the second killing at a mining project in the autonomous region of Papua New Guinea in recent months.

Channon Lumpoo, 27, was shot by a high-powered weapon on Monday in the Kokoda constituency of south Bougainville.

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Tragedy at sea: eight dead and four rescued after 32 days adrift in South Pacific

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Group left Papua New Guinea in canoe before Christmas and survivors were rescued almost 2,000km away a month later

Four people have been rescued after spending 32 days adrift in the South Pacific, after a tragic voyage that resulted in the deaths of eight of their fellow travellers, including a baby.

The group left Bougainville island, east of the mainland of Papua New Guinea, on 22 December to travel the Carteret Islands 100km away for Christmas celebrations.

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‘So many women were killed’: fighting sorcery-related violence in Papua New Guinea – video

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Parts of Papua New Guinea continue to grapple with violence related to sanguma, black magic or sorcery. Deaths in villages are often blamed on people accused of sorcery, who are tortured or murdered. Now an Oxfam-backed organisation is tackling the problem by providing support to survivors of violence and to the local police to prevent incidents

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Pacific nations need much more than Scott Morrison’s thanks to survive

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Governments from across the Pacific have offered support for bushfire relief but are in a tight spot with Australia over the climate crisis

When Scott Morrison thanked governments of the world for their assistance with Australia’s bushfire crisis, he particularly singled out “the loving response from our Pacific family”.

Across the Pacific region – a collection of developing and least developed nations that are themselves almost uniquely at risk from climate-induced catastrophes – the response to the Australian bushfires has been immediate and generous, but it also reveals something of the problematic fraternity that Australia has with the rest of the region.

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Zac Efron falls ill while filming reality show Killing Zac Efron

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US actor hit by suspected typhoid while filming survival TV series in Papua New Guinea

The American actor Zac Efron has confirmed he recently fell ill while filming a survival reality TV show in Papua New Guinea.

Australian media had reported that Efron, 32, was flown by helicopter for treatment in Australia after contracting a bacterial infection, possibly typhoid, while shooting the Killing Zac Efron series.

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New Zealand would be honoured to take Behrouz Boochani. Australia be damned | Morgan Godfery

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The moral case for the former Manus island detainee becoming a citizen is as simple as ‘asylum is a human right’

I wonder if it winds up Peter Dutton to know that Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish-Iranian journalist, award-winning author and former Manus Island detainee, is a free man in the continent’s orbit. Boochani, the best-known witness, critic and victim of Australia’s offshore “processing centres”, remains in New Zealand after his 30-day visa came to an end. No one quite knows what the No Friend But the Mountains author is planning next, but it seems safe to assume that sooner or later he’ll lodge an application for asylum in New Zealand. A permanent reminder to Dutton, his predecessors and the country’s immigration detention system that they are not as close to vanishing the “boat people” problem as they might have thought.

For their part New Zealand’s policymakers fear as much with headlines suggesting if Boochani’s hypothetical asylum application is successful it could “fuel tensions with Australia”. The problem is Behrouz Boochani, New Zealander, would enjoy free movement between his new home and his old incarcerators, unless Dutton and the gang insert new exceptions in the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement. This is the “back door” the Coalition government in Canberra is so afraid of, and the political problem preventing Scott Morrison from taking up Jacinda Ardern’s invitation to resettle the last remaining detainees on Manus.

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Dead rats, putrid flesh and sweaty socks: rare orchid gives UK botanists their first whiff

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The plant has flowered for the first time in Britain, but the climate crisis is making such events rarer than ever

It is famous for smelling like “a thousand dead elephants rotting in the sun”, its petals resemble decaying flesh, and it is so rare that outside its natural habitat in Papua New Guinea, few botanists in the world have ever seen it in flower.

Now this highly pungent orchid – Bulbophyllum phalaenopsis – is in bloom for the first time in a glasshouse at Cambridge University Botanic Garden.

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Bougainville referendum: region votes overwhelmingly for independence from Papua New Guinea

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Jubilation at result but region faces long process ahead before it can become world’s newest nation

The autonomous region of Bougainville has voted overwhelmingly in favour of becoming independent from Papua New Guinea, paving the way for the group of islands to become the world’s newest nation.

More than 180,000 people in Bougainville, a collection of islands flung 700km off the coast of Papua New Guinea in the Solomon Sea, participated in a referendum over the last few weeks that has been nearly 20 years in the making.

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Refugees on their own land: the West Papuans in limbo in Papua New Guinea

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Up to 7,000 West Papuans live in refugee villages, separated from their homeland by the wide, despoiled Fly River

It’s 35 years since Agapitus Kiku decided he didn’t want a future without freedom.

As a young man he’d been pressed into a work gang, bristling under the watch of Indonesian soldiers whose authority over his tribal country, in the south-east corner of the vast contested province then called Irian Jaya, he refused to recognise.

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Bougainville referendum: voting begins amid scenes of jubilation

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People are ‘in the mood for celebration’ as they choose whether to split from Papua New Guinea

After 20 years, the big day has finally arrived for the people of Bougainville. Large crowds gathered on Saturday at the aptly named Bel Isi (Peace) park in Buka for the first day of a two-week referendum to decide whether the archipelago should become independent from Papua New Guinea.

Amid a significant security presence, hundreds of Bougainvilleans marched through the streets as they followed the autonomous region’s president, John Momis, as he arrived at a polling booth to cast his vote.

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‘We’ve wanted this for a long time’: Bougainville prepares for independence vote

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Archipelago’s flags replace Papua New Guinean ones on government buildings ahead of voting in referendum

Bougainville will head to the polls tomorrow to decide whether the region will seek independence from Papua New Guinea and become the world’s newest country, in a referendum that has been 20 years in the making.

The small archipelago of islands about 700km east of mainland Papua New Guinea, will hold a referendum that its people have been looking forward to since the ceasefire that ended a brutal civil war in 1998 and the signing of the Bougainville Peace Agreement in 2001.

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Peace agreements normally fail within five years. Bougainville is a lesson to us all | Bertie Ahern

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Bougainvilleans will vote in an independence referendum this weekend, the result of a unique Melanesian process of reconciliation

Thirty years ago Bougainville lost 20,000 people in a brutal civil war that lasted almost a decade.

This week Bougainvilleans will go to the polls to vote on independence from Papua New Guinea, but in a very different mood – one of joy and celebration. Underlying this historic occasion is a resolve by all sides to honour the fallen, but never again return to conflict.

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Birth of a nation? Bougainville’s referendum explained

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It is a vote that has been 20 years in the making. On Saturday, residents of the remote archipelago in the Solomon Sea will start to decide their future

On Saturday, the people of Bougainville – a small archipelago of islands flung 700km off the coast of Papua New Guinea in the Solomon Sea – will begin voting in a referendum that will determine if their beloved homeland will become the world’s newest nation.

It is a vote that has been nearly 20 years in the making. In 2001, as part of a peace agreement to end a devastating decade-long civil war, the government of Papua New Guinea promised the population of Bougainville, then about 200,000 people, that they would one day be able to cast a vote to decide their future.

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Behrouz Boochani, brutalised but not beaten by Manus, says simply: ‘I did my best’

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After six hellish years inside Australia’s offshore detention regime, Boochani reflects on the country that rejected him, his new-found freedom and the friends he left behind

“One day,” Behrouz Boochani said, observing the bleakness of the abandoned Manus detention centre, its dark form illuminated by wood stripped from the buildings being burned for light, “we will meet in some other place, far away from here.”

That was two years ago, in the middle of a warm November night, when Boochani helped smuggle this reporter into the decommissioned Manus Island detention centre where 400 men were holding out against being forcibly removed: rationing their dwindling supply of food and medicine, guarding against the violent police crackdown they knew was coming, repairing the freshwater wells that had been deliberately spoiled by the retreating guards.

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