PNG woman Rosa Yakapus endured days of public torture. No one came to save her

In a country awash with Australian police funding, why are so many Papua New Guinean women dying such brutal deaths?

Rosa Yakapus endured three days of torture before being murdered in the PNG highlands.

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Last Tuesday, Papua New Guineans received a government phone alert that a new Australian-trained counterterrorist unit – the latest beneficiary of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding – was being deployed with “shoot to kill” orders to address soaring tribal violence.

A day earlier, in Ugu village in PNG’s impoverished Hela Province, Rosa Yakapus, stripped naked and tied to a pole with her legs spread wide and a fire burning beneath her, was enduring a third day of extreme and very public torture over a sorcery allegation.

Her estranged husband, a man she had supported through teachers college only for him to marry another woman after his career took flight, had died of a suspected heart attack and his relatives had accused her of using witchcraft to kill him.

Graphic videos of Rosa’s ordeal circulating before her death and in the days since, including her assault with hot sticks and knives, have raised questions about the police response to such an extreme and public crime.

The Australian has been told a local community police officer at a Margarima police station, less than 40 minutes’ drive from Ugu village, had fielded calls from several villagers alerting them to the ongoing torture. They hoped police could come and save her. But no one rescued Rosa Yakapus.

The Margarima local community police officer was on his own with no car.

He called Sergeant Alice Arigo, the committed, lone family and gender violence officer in a region now riven with such crimes, who for the past week has been personally caring for two sorcery-related violence victims for lack of a local safe house.

She too had no car – after it was “requisitioned” by another station – and needed backup, which took time to organise, time that Rosa Yakapus did not have. Hela Province police commander Michael Heli, a two-hour drive away, was only 10 days into the job and still finding his feet when he too learned of Rosa’s ordeal. He ordered a car to be sent to Margarima but it was too late.

Villagers of the Hela province, where Rosa Yakapus was murdered, clad in traditional costume. Picture: Saeed Khan / AFP

In a province where huge police and military resources are dedicated to protecting Santos oil and LNG projects, there were apparently no resources available for a woman whose impending murder had been all but broadcast through viral video.

Australia has sunk much more than a billion dollars into building up PNG’s defence and police forces in the past decade, $637m this year alone in development assistance; and another $600m to support a Port Moresby-based team in Australia’s National Rugby League – all in the interests of geostrategic security.

Yet there were no vehicles, no fuel, no manpower to save Rosa, none either for at least two other women in her district killed weeks earlier in horrifically similar circumstances, nor for countless PNG women every year who face beatings, torture and sorcery accusation-related mob killings.

Australian money, it seems, has done little to improve their security.

In Rosa’s final hours another video shows her still naked, signs of torture on her body.

It is dark and she is blindfolded. Her head is hanging down and she is surrounded by a mob of men, some laughing, many taking video.

“Did you remove his heart?” one village leader is heard to ask.

In earlier videos she has protested her innocence but this time she weakly confesses.

She did take his heart, she says, but she can put it back and revive him if only they will allow her to go free. It is a feeble and ultimately futile last effort to save her life.

The TWL Group base at Nogoli in the Hides gas fields was set on fire by rival clans. The base is in the Hela province of PNG.

On Tuesday last week, after 72 hours of enduring the most extreme, humiliating and sexual-related violence – much of it reportedly committed in front of her five children – her death is recorded in one final video.

Rosa cowers weakly at the very edge of a bridge while a village mob looks on. A single gunshot rings out and her body falls into the river below.

“It took three days and nobody tried to stop it,” says Hela Province bishop Reverend Steven Bai, who has called for all those responsible to surrender. “Even the police didn’t come on time. The problem was manpower and logistics.”

In the days since Rosa Yakapus’s death police have finally mobilised but there have been no arrests yet.

“Police always give the excuse that they don’t have the vehicles but PNG police have more LandCruisers than any other department,” says James Komengi, one of a few critically under-resourced NGO, church and police workers battling rising incidences of sorcery accusation-related violence (SARV) and murders in PNG’s highlands provinces.

LNG being shipped out of Papua New Guinea.

Komengi has seen far too many cases, too many graphic videos, in recent months and years of sorcery accusation-related violence, which has only migrated into the southern highlands from other provinces in recent years.

But even for him, what Rosa Yakapus endured looked to be a new level of brutality, something he fears will become normalised if the government cannot finally find the resources to address it.

“It’s like it’s becoming a competition to see who can be more violent, to do worse than what others have done,” Komengi tells The Australian.

“There is no traditional belief attached to it. It’s just men taking advantage of a woman’s body.”

A young girl in the settlements outside Goroka, Papua New Guinea, whose mother, father, and grandmother have been accused of sorcery. Picture: Adam Browne

While the PNG government was now focusing more on addressing extreme and rising levels of tribal violence in communities, violence against women, including SARV crimes, were not prioritised, he said.

In Hela, the only police officer dedicated to dealing with family and sexual-related violence is Sergeant Alice Arigo – a “one-woman phenomenon”, as Australian anthropologist Michael Main describes her – who runs the Tari Family and Sexual Violence Unit in the home town of PNG Prime Minister James Marape.

She often travels on foot between villages to try to educate people about sorcery accusation-related violence and new laws passed to deal with it.

In the wake of Rosa’s death it was Arigo who took a team of officers into Ugu village last week, only to be confronted by a remorseless community convinced of its own righteousness.

“The whole village thinks that Rosa was the cause of her husband’s death, even the community leaders,” she told The Australian on Friday.

“No one stood up for her because they feared they too would be threatened.”

Now it has fallen to Arigo to devise a plan for how to return safely to the village and arrest the 20 or more men involved in Rosa’s horrific torture and death.

“It’s dangerous but if we have the right resources, the firepower and the manpower, we can do it,” she insists.

“The world is watching PNG. We need to do something, get to the bottom of this and arrest these men. We need cars and fuel and rations.”

On Sunday, a full five days after Rosa Yakapus’s murder, PNG Police Commissioner David Manning announced a K50,000 ($18,500) reward for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for her torture and killing, publicly expressing his disgust at her “brutal degradation, torture and murder”.

“There are no words to describe the animal acts of those who tortured and murdered this woman. For those who watched or did nothing, the word is coward,” he said in a statement, calling on the many people in the communities involved who knew the identities and whereabouts of the culprits to come forward.

“I condemn in the strongest terms these so called ‘cultural beliefs’ of sanguma (sorcery). These excuses for abhorrent crimes are an abomination. These are not the beliefs of our society. They were not known to our nation 50 years ago and have no place in our nation today.”

Professor Miranda Forsyth, an ANU professor and director of the International Network Against Witchcraft Accusations, told The Australian she despaired at the continuation of extreme levels of violence against women in PNG, even as the government has granted broad powers to a new counter-terrorism security taskforce to deal with tribal violence.

Commissioner Manning boasted in May that his elite new unit, trained by Australian-based Executive Risk Solutions and to be known as Kumul 23, would “surgically remove violent criminal threats and those who terrorise our communities”.

“This is what they should be intervening in. They have all this capacity and this is where it is needed,” Forsyth says. “I cannot think of an act of terrorism more appropriate for the taskforce to focus on than sorcery accusation-related violence, which spreads so much fear and intimidation.”