Undone by inexplicable barbarism

 THE killing of two guides and wounding of several expatriates on the Black Cat trail in Morobe evokes outrage in all of us.

Why would some low lives creep up on innocent, unsuspecting trekkers and their guides who are there for an adventure and attack them in such a gruesome manner.

Two innocent Papua New Guineans are dead for no reason other than the fact that they needed some income and had chosen to carry cargo for trekkers on the track.

Tired from the five or six hours’ walk they had done in the early part of Tuesday, the two were sleeping when the criminals descended upon the party and told everyone to lie down. The two heard the noise and woke up to investigate and were immediately slashed fatally with machetes.

Photographs we have seen of injured and dead persons indicate the actions of some mentally deranged person or persons.

If theft were the motive alone, surely holding up the persons would have been sufficient but it seems there might have been other reasons for this gruesome attack. 

Two families are grieving their loss while a group of adventurers will take away from Papua New Guinea their own versions of the experience to regale all who will listen the tale of how the barbaric atrocity visited them in the jungles of primitive PNG.

Without the incident, the story would have been the opposite – a group of adventure-hungry people who would have recommended to other adverture seekers of the chance to walk a jungle track where once Australians, Americans and Japanese soldiers and their PNG carriers fought and died.

The collateral damage to the nation of incidents such as this are enduring and renders obsolete every year of goodwill and hundreds of thousands of kina spent in advertising.

For the expatriate person who is genuinely interested in Papua New Guinea and who has lived here for at least a year, the hype abroad about crime in PNG can seem exaggerated at times.

Yes, there is crime in Papua New Guinea but perhaps it is not that much different to many other countries or cities in similar socio-economic circumstances.

Those friends of PNG have throwaway one-liners like: “It is a time thing. The country is experiencing growing pains. It will go away by and by.”

But then along comes an event or incident such as the Black Cat incident that reinforces all the stereotypes out there.

Just one incident like that derails many hundreds of hours of work and hundreds of thousands of kina in advertising by the Tourism Promotion Authority and a very few diehard tour operators like Christie King, the proprietor of PNG Trekking Adventures, which organised this particular tour, put in. 

It is plainly infuriating.

Even Prime Minister Peter O’Neill yesterday condemned the attack saying the perpetrators should receive the death penalty.

We share his sentiments.

The Black Cat Trek stretches from the Salamaua coast in Huon Gulf, over the rugged mountains west of Wau Rural in Bulolo district.

O’Neill said there could be no possible excuse for the brutal crimes against visitors to Papua New Guinea and Papua New Guineans who were acting as their guides.

“At a time when we are seeking to increase tourism, these crimes are an obvious setback. But  we must not let them deter tourists and travellers generally visiting Papua New Guinea, and our own people helping visitors in their travels,” he said.

“I express my sympathy to the families of the guides who were murdered, and the victims who sustained injury.”

From long experience we can say that any assurance from the police that the perpetrators might be arrested soon would be plain wrong.

Crimes committed within towns and cities where there is heavy police presence usually end up forgotten because police fail to turn in the culprits. 

And when that happens criminals are encouraged to strike again and again.

This will continue until and unless decisive action is taken against persons responsible for atrocious acts of this sort.

The only way to stop criminals in their tracks is to let them know by decisive and committed police work that no matter where a crime is committed, no criminal is safe from the long arm of the law.