PNG headaches: feuding truckies

and suburban assassins

From GUS SMALES in Port Moresby

Murders in Port Moresby, and the likelihood of murders among feud ing truckdrivers on the Highlands Highway, were grabbing headlines in Papua New Guinea in March.

Police records show that from July, 1976, Port Moresby has had a murder every fortnight.

The PNG Police Association has sharply criticised the government over the spate of killings in the capital, saying “many of them could have been prevented”.

The association said that better street lighting was needed in some areas with a high incidence of crime as a partial deterrent to crimes of violence.

It also criticised Port Moresby’s “road to nowhere”, a showplace mile of brilliantly lit multi-lane highway near the government’s national headquarters.

The association’s president, Sergeant Semel Buka, said the light ing was wasteful and served no logi cal purpose in an area which was not used at night except for passing motor traffic. Street lighting in this area should be cut back to a third,

and diverted to more needy areas, he said.

He said that adequate street light ing would not stop crime completely but would greatly assist in limiting it.

Port Moresby’s most recent murder, in which a policeman’s brother was killed on March 7, had occured at Kaugere, a poorly-lit suburb with a record of violent crime.

The trouble with the truckes is rooted in tribal-type loyalties and suspicions and it is threatening sup ply lines to the PNG inland.

Fights and drunken brawls among drivers and their hangers-on at roadside stopovers on the 500-km Highlands Highway are putting some drivers in fear of their lives.

They have threatened to strike if the police can’t protect them, or to take the law into their own hands by answering violence with violence.

The drivers come from two dis tinct ethnic and cultural areas the coastal PNG mainland, and the rug ged Central Highlands.

The distrust which the two groups

held for each other in the history of early contact is now being kept alive on the trucking routes.

Generally the men from the two areas don’t even look alike the Highlanders are squat and powerful, the coastal men taller and wiry.

Their languages are different, althouth they can exchange words or insults in English or Melanesian Pidgin.

When the highway was opened 12 years ago, most of the drivers were whites. But the new generation of Papua New Guineans quickly learnt their trade and began driving the trucks which keep Highlands towns

in supplies.

At first the operation of the trucks, some driven by Highlanders and some by coastal men, was seen as a unifying influence in PNG’s fragmented societies.

But, ironically, the development of national political institutions has contributed to the newest outbreak of trouble.

The Chimbu Province, recently granted provincial government under new political arrangements, has become a centre of trouble on the Highlands Highway.

Belligerent Highlands truckdrivers have told the coastal men: “We have our own government now, and that means you keep out we don’t want you on the roads in our areas.”

One driver from the coast re ported in March that he had been stopped at a roadblock apparently put in position by Highland drivers and their companions. Bottles were thrown at his truck, one hitting his head and injuring him.

The president of the PNG Road Transport Association, Mr Fred Cook, confirmed reports of trouble on the roads and said that many dri vers would be within their rights to strike.

This would have a disastrous effect on the movement of produce out of the Highlands and general supplies into the Highlands, he said.