BY RAMON GLAZOV
I’VE BEEN SPENDING THIS PAST MONTH in a paranoid little town called Mt Hagen. My motel’s pretty typical for New Guinea: there’s a huge, corrugated-iron wall around the perimeter with a sheet-metal gate you have to bang loudly every time you want in.
You knock on the gate, the doorman peeps through a little hole and lets you into the car park. There are two more checkpoints: one to your immediate left, which leads to a hut full of pokie machines — you can see gamblers getting pat-downs on their way in — and a moat at the other end of the car park, with yet another gate, another guard post, which takes you to the inner courtyard with the actual motel rooms.
Luckily, there aren’t any bedbugs here, which is always my biggest fear. There’s everything else, though: ants, wasps, moths, scarab beetles, butterflies, praying mantises. Motel owners here stuff their gardens with as many tropical plants, thatched gazeboes and pseudo-Japanese bridges as money can buy.
A few fancier places keep hornbills and tree kangaroos in cages; anything to soften the paranoia, pad the cell, keep things looking less fortressy. At the place I’m staying, someone even found time to braid ponytails out of the vine-tendrils hanging along the perimeter fence.
The moat’s half-dry now, thanks to water rationing, leaving a school of very claustrophobic koi squeezing through shallow green water while their ceiling closes in on them like some computer dungeon trap.
Nearby, the inner-courtyard gate is made from the same latticed iron barrier-material you’ll find fixed to car windows and bank teller booths around town. Stuck to the wall where the guards are sitting is a list of customers banned from the hotel bar: “Councillor Jim Kuri,” “Dr Samu,” and “Mr Jacob (Lawyer?).”
Mt Hagen isn’t the most violent place in Papua New Guinea, but it’s still a scantily policed dystopia where women and tourists can’t go out at night — not alone, anyway — for fear of being mugged or raped by PNG’s notorious raskols.
Speaking to Kaiglo Ambane, the Provincial Police Commander for Western Highlands Province (which includes Hagen), I learned that about a thousand serious crimes — that is, rapes, murders and armed robberies — are committed within his jurisdiction every year, leading to about three or four hundred arrests.
Why does Hagen have such a serious crime problem? Most likely because it’s the capital of a province with 600,000 people and only 388 police, far lower than the UN minimum requirement of one cop to every 450 people. According to Ambane, his police force has barely grown since 1975, when PNG gained independence from Australia. Not only does it lack funds for recruitment, but it doesn’t even have a large enough barracks, with enough dorm rooms, to house all those needed recruits.
You can read the full Roman Glazov article here
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