CONFLICT

Memorial at Aita signals closure

AT FIRST glance, the small village of Aita, in the central part of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, seems idyllic but a deeper look reveals a darker history.
Nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the rugged ranges of Wakunai, this village of less than 3,000 people was forced to abandon its subsistence way of life and flee into Wakunai’s mountains during the civil war (1989–1997), to escape the deadly bullets of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force.
They lived safely in the tropical jungle until the fateful afternoon of May 17, 1992, when a band of rowdy soldiers attacked their camp while the villagers were celebrating the region’s self-proclaimed Unilateral Independence Day. The raid, which was carried out under the guise of a special operation, claimed 14 lives.
In total, Aita lost 27 lives to the civil war, 14 of them to the massacre and the remaining to abductions and other killings later.
Maika Somi, who is now the chief of Aita, was 25 and keeping a watch over the camp the day it happened. He recalled, “We were caught off guard. People did not have time to take cover. I was lucky enough to escape.”
Only eight of those lost were given proper burials while the rest remain unaccounted for even today.
Although years have passed and ordinary life has resumed its course, the survivors still don’t have closure. In addition to not knowing what happened to their loved ones, they are also struggling to keep the memories of the conflict alive in the younger minds.
Considering all these things, Chief Somi decided to erect a monument to help his community get closure and etch the memories on the mind of the future generations.
The monument, built with the support of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), is a white structure with gold-coloured plaques bearing the names of all 27 people who lost their lives.
“Our children know about the history, but they have no idea about the impact the events had on us. They have heard the stories but don’t fully understand the accompanying emotions. This monument will outlive many of us from the older generation and will act as a reminder to the future generations about how this village had suffered,” Chief Somi said.
This memorial is the second of the two monuments that the ICRC has helped construct in the region. Operational in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville since 2011, the ICRC has lately been focusing on helping communities find closure by commemorating the missing.
On Aug 31, 2019, the International Day of the Disappeared, and nearly 27 years after the raid, Aita held a small but solemn commemoration ceremony for the new memorial.
“At last, we have something concrete to remember our loved ones with. This monument is symbolic of the 10-year crisis and a kind reminder to the younger generation of how politics affects innocent people,” said Thomas Keriri, a Rau Constituency member in the government, at the commemoration.

• Story and pictures courtesy of International Committee of the Red Cross.

CYBER SECURITY

Lae hosts internet security training

By BRADLEY MARIORI
A FIRST-of-its-kind internet security training was recently conducted recently in Lae aimed at IT professionals like network specialists and system administrators.
The focus was to make sure those trained were able to secure network devices, servers, workstations, web servers and even ensure security for users.
Asia Pacific Network Information Center (Apnic) who conducted the training said a lot of the time, it was up to the individual user or home user to make sure they are keeping themselves secured.
The training covered a range of operating systems and network security concerns, vulnerability and analysis and penetration testing where the attendees were taught to actually do security assessments and test the security of their networks. They will later follow on after this with how to improve the security of their systems.
“We are teaching people to think not just like defenders but to think like attackers so they can spot the problems hopefully before the attackers find them,” Apnic internet security specialist, Jamie Gillespie said.
Gillespie said the security they were trying to bring into the country was actually not just for companies but to make the country as a whole more secure.
The training was provided under grants from Australia and New Zealand and the Asia Foundation so the attendees actually attended for free using free and open source tools and techniques.
They can now go straight to their work places and implement the tools and technology learnt.
One of the challenges that people have been talking about is that they’ve been working in networks for so long without higher levels of security.
Gillespie said implementing new technologies was going to take time. Sometimes their users have been working without security making it easy to do their work.
“Implementing security is going to make their users harder to do their work. So we are trying our best to highlight how they can do a stage approach, doing it step by step and making small improvements as you go through rather than doing a large change and affecting everyone’s daily business activities.
“Some of the problems that you are going to be experiencing or you may already be experiencing now as you get more bandwidth, as you get new submarine cables coming in, it’s going to make a more attractive target because sometimes what the attackers are trying to do is utilise your bandwidth for illegal and malicious purposes.
“They may be trying to get financial gain but sometimes they’re after bandwidth gain and access to computer resources. So obviously, as you have more bandwidth, it’s making it more of an interesting target. But the important thing to remember is that even with the bandwidth that PNG has right now, you are a target.”
He said no longer can any industry or individual company, no matter how big or small, say that they are not targets so why would they try and attack them.
“What’s happening on the internet now is that attackers are doing a wide range of attacks and they don’t care who it is that they are attacking. If you are vulnerable, if you are weak, you will show up on their radar and it gets easy for them to target you.
“But on the other side of things, businesses in PNG are running Rap (risk assessment programme) servers and are running their own systems which are targets from attackers. “So nothing is safe, from families, home connections, mobile phone connections all the way to large corporations. Everybody is being attacked in many different ways,” he said.
“PNG has recently created some cyber security laws with penalties for people doing illegal and malicious activities on the internet and that’s really good to see because it shows that PNG will not harbour illegal activities.
“It’s not going to become a black spot on the global internet and we’ve seen more of the Pacific Islands coming up and bringing on this new cyber security laws.
“A lot of them are under a global law called the Budapest Convention where it’s say that countries will not accept illegal activities on the internet.
“Beyond that, you also have policies at organisational levels. Companies are, and if they don’t, should have policies that dictate what is acceptable to be done on their networks and using their resources. At a basic level, like are they allowed to access YouTube videos, Facebook during work and getting into more malicious things that can be damaging like gambling websites and pornography?
“If you don’t have these policies, how do you tell your users what is acceptable and what is not? Even on the policy side, which is not very technical, it’s something that companies have to be aware of so that they don’t fall into liability with the new cyber laws,” Gillespie said.