Crime has overtaken the law

NO more heartrending a story have we have we carried in the pages of this paper as that which we carry on the front page of The National today.
In clear Tok Pisin, a brave 17-year-old girl from remote Mt Bosavi in Hela relates the three days of terror, rape, physical beating, forced marches and starvation endured by 15 teenage girls and two married women who were abducted last Wednesday night.
She tells us of her father answering the door in the middle of the night, thinking it was a relative.
She tells of the frightening few minutes when strange men confront her family, of her being herded out into the night to wait at an abandoned house while other members of the gang round up the other girls and two married women.
She relates the forced march, the repeated rapes, the cries of the littler ones, the relentless beatings and carrying the heavy bags of the gang members through the forest in the middle of the night.
To her assailant, our girl begs at one point.
“Plis noken mekim dispela. Mi olsem sista bilong yu. Mi olsem mama bilong you. You bai pilim wanem sapos wanpela man mekim olsem long sista bilong yu. Em no harim mi.”
(I cried and begged for mercy. I am just like your sister and mother. Do you have a sister? How would you feel if someone did this to your sister? All to deaf ears.)
We find no words to describe the crime or the perpetrators of it.
Terror, shock, trauma, pain and hopelessness there certainly would have been for the victims.
What the parents and relatives went through is yet another part of this ordeal.
For we are not seeing here a crime of passion, of some desperate men lusting after sex but a premeditated cruelty sprung upon a peaceful community in the safe knowledge that there is neither threat from the community or from the law.
As much as it is a crime against the young girls who went through this terrible ordeal, it is a crime against the society that the girls come from.
The girl children were brutalised and the parents were terrorised and threatened for extortion money.
We agree with the Governor for East Sepik, Allan Bird who yesterday told Parliament that girls and mothers and communities throughout the length and breadth of this nation deserve protection from their government.
How can a community be held to ransom and teenage children brutalised without the protection of their government?
It is not enough that we hear more empty promises from the police commissioner that all of the state’s resources would be employed to bring the perpetrators to justice.
We have seen another school girl, not much older than these girls who was raped multiple times by men in this same province who then took videos of their victim and posted in on social media.
We have seen so much killings, including school children from this same province.
We have seen a hostage situation in this same Bosavi area perpetrated by the same thugs involved in the most recent event and they have not yet been caught.
Indeed, the fact of their being still at large and the fact that they were paid a handsome K100,000 for the release of the New Zealand and his three assistants has led to this copycat crime.
It will happen again.
There seems to be no protection from the law. It is as if there is no government in this country.
It is a sad but true state of affairs in this country today, two years from the time Papua New Guinea will turn 50.
It is a sad fact that we live in a land where crime has overtaken the law, where the government is hapless and helpless in the face of it all.