Taskforce officers’ sacking sought

MINUTES after the PNG Apec security forces (police and Corrections) stormed Parliament, damaging the Peoples’ House, Police Commissioner Gari Baki promised that everyone involved in the ransacking of the Parliament building and unrest in Port Moresby will be dealt with. To date, only 11 police officers have arrested while the truckloads of security personnel who stormed Parliament are still walking free.
Many of those officers were literally seen by the police commissioner himself, the Parliament workers, and Government ministers in local television footage. They should have been immediately arrested and terminated.
We should know why it is taking so long for the hundreds who stormed Parliament to be arrested when police officers have been known to arrest suspects even when there has been no clear evidence that a crime has been committed.
It seems that the same laws that apply to everyone else does not apply to the security forces because they have guns and are therefore immune to laws that govern everyone else, even though the whole country saw everything on television, the newspapers and social media.
The police commissioner’s statement that video footage and images will be used to identify the perpetrators (The National, Dec 12) contradicts the behaviour of police officers who arrest people without evidence.
There is also evidence that security forces used State assets to illegally enter the Parliament premises in truckloads with the common intention to commit a crime.
They should be arrested, irrespective of the rank and file.
The laws are pretty simple in that “where two or more persons form an intention in common to carry out an unlawful purpose and to assist each other therein and any one of them, in carrying out the common purpose, commits an offence, each of them who knew or ought to have known that the commission of the offence would be a probable consequence, shall be subject to the same laws of the land”.
We don’t hear of security forces anywhere in the world going into Parliament and damaging things, unless, of course, it is a coup d’etat.
This is usually the work of terrorists.
For PNG’s law enforcement agencies – whose members are PNG-born citizens to attack the sovereignty of the people, the State has to view that seriously.
Those officers and officials took an oath to uphold the Constitution and serve the country.
To break that oath and do what they did, they should have been sacked on the spot.
Because of social media the whole world was able to watch the ransacking of Parliament so soon after the closing of the Apec Leaders’ Summit in Port Moresby.
PNG should give the world the same strong headlines by sacking all those senseless security forces officers involved in the attack on the People’s House.
Members of the security forces were recruited off the streets with grade 6 and 10 education and some of them even got in through crooked and corrupt practices and the country therefore will lose nothing if they are sacked.
There are thousands of grade 12s and university graduates in the country to fill the gap.

Kende Kiripe
Rokunerepe Areke