02 July 2013 Murder perpetrators: frustrated locals or Chinese triads? KELA KAPKORA SIL BOLKIN THE TWO DAILY NEWSPAPERS of Papua New Guinea led worldwide reports of how four Chinese nationals had been killed in a knife attack in Port Moresby last week. Three men and one woman were stabbed to death in their food shop last Monday night. In the last five years in PNG, we have read stories about Asians being brutally murdered, the looting of Asian-owned firms, and preparations to bring in thousands more Asian guest workers to build the multi-billion-dollar liquefied natural gas plants. Wikipedia says that Chinese people in PNG form a diverse community. As of 2008, only 1,000 of the "old Chinese" — locally born descendants of late 19th and early 20th-century immigrants — remained in the country; most having moved to Australia. However, there had been an influx of new arrivals from mainland China, overseas Chinese communities in South-east Asia and a few from Taiwan. Despite the abundant civility of the pioneer Chinese, it is evident that the new arrivals have little respect for the local people they employ. Worse still, they seem to have no respect for the laws of PNG. The Chinese recruit and employ vagrants from the highlands and arm them with bush knives, iron rods and guns to bash anyone, including children and their mothers, for any small mischief in their shops. They have been known to bribe policemen to side with them and persecute the people the police signed an oath to protect. Furthermore, in almost all cases, politicians and fat cats shelter the Chinese from the criminal justice system. When you look at the situation closely, aggrieved Papua New Guineans cannot pursue justice from a corrupted criminal justice system because the system bends to protect the Chinese culprits. As a consequence, the locals will most likely take the law into their own hands, which may result in murder.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 04:23:27 +0000
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