elongates - retracts - spins out again

Lido village and Vanimo town were tense. An Engan husband and wife, living in Vanimo for the mister’s job (snr public servant), were having trouble. She’d heard that he’d been having an affair with a local woman, a girl from Lido. The missus decided to pay a visit to Lido; there she had an argument with villagers for allowing a girl from their village to have an affair with her husband.

A few days later, on Thursday 1 Sept, her brother JKK is spotted in Vanimo and attacked by Lido villagers. He runs away – is chased – runs to court house for refuge – is beaten. (Controversially, three plainclothes policemen were at the court house and saw what happened, but didn’t intervene.) The beating stops, but a relative of the Lido girl hits the Engan man with a plank. The blow gets him on the side of the head, and it is fatal.

The relative soon surrenders to the police, and a type of calm settles. But it now turns into a story in the press. The following week things about the town start to appear: "armed villagers were patrolling the town freely", it is reported: Lido villagers with high powered arms (later denied by police); "not the first time Lido villagers have attacked other Papua New Guineans living and working in town", it is claimed. Police are too friendly with the Lido villagers, it is asserted. Businesses fear rioting.

A petition is presented to the provincial authorities by the town’s Highlander community. They are calling for an investigation into the event, and for the policemen involved to be fired or transferred. Also in this list is a demand for compensation for the killing of the Enga man. They want K200,000 cash, 20 pigs, 20 cassowaries, 10 cows, and an additional K25,000 for "repatriation and funeral expenses".

Lido villagers in general stay away from town. Police go to Lido, and with the help of the village leaders, they apprehend nine "suspects" and question them. They charge the relative who had surrendered (the media do not report that he surrendered, but this is what a Lido villager asserts). It is alleged that there is a ringleader amongst the nine, a former policeman. With the questioning of these nine, tension rises again.

On Tuesday 6, police publicly issue an ultimatum: they will not tolerate protests or marches about this issue. (If you want to protest, you have to get approval from police and give seven days’ notice.) Police call for Lido and Highlanders leaders to sit down and talk. (This itself is a bit of a sticky comment, because it comes from the police chief who has also just called for motorists not to stop if raskols try and hold them up, but to run them down.)

But town remains agitated and on Wednesday businesses do not open. Highlanders – ones living locally, and friends and family of JKK who have travelled up to Vanimo – march through the streets and present a compensation petition to the provincial government. This petition demands that the police chief and his entire force be removed; the other demands have increased a little:

K200,000 cash
20 pigs (K120,000 value)
Cassowaries (K20,000 value)
10 cows (K15,000 value)
K16,000 to repatriate body from V to Hagen, plus K5,000 to transport it to Wabag
K25,000 funeral expenses

The provincial governor announced that the government would not be paying the compensation - because it had not been budgeted for, and (oh yeah) it would breach the financial regulations act.

It's around this point that you realise the event has turned into story. The truth elongates - retracts - and spins out again. Maybe one one Lido villager was involved, after all; maybe JKK was attacked because earlier a Wabag man had pulled a bush knife on the Lido girl. What occurred, and why, changes according to who is talking.
**
On the way back from Indonesia, we stayed in Lido village - quite unaware of what had been going on. Here we met Frank: a friendly and exceptional conversationalist. (He is my oral source; other findings have been gleaned from archival research, most notably involving PNG’s two daily rags.) Naively, I asked him "so what was this about Engans and riots recently?", and he told us a story.

Now I know that, like the other versions, what he spoke of contained his own sympathies. As with Biak, I wish that I had been more aware of the context I was walking through, and talking about.