“Evil spirits”: a Russian oil worker from New Guinea told how the murders of Papuans are being investigated

Papua New Guinea is a jungle, cannibalism, clan wars, poverty and “black magic”. The state is located practically at the edge of the world, sandwiched on both sides by Australia and Indonesia.

Tribal conflicts are common in New Guinea, as are massacres. In addition, cannibalism is still practiced in the state. Terrible customs are not a good life. We talked about this with Marcel Idrisov, who worked in Papua New Guinea from 2013 to 2015.

“The Chinese disappeared without a trace”

We started talking about local residents.

— We worked in remote places where there are oil fields. This is a deep jungle,” says Marcel. — By law, foreign companies are required to hire local residents. It is clear that the entire engineering staff and supervisors are British, Australians, Americans, and Europeans. Locals were sent to cleaning, security, and the canteen. I had to communicate with the Papuans.

I traveled a lot around the region. My driver was local. We understood each other well, their language is similar to English. But there wasn’t much to talk about, except for everyday topics. Papuans are uneducated and did not go to school. I doubt they know how to write. I noticed that they clearly had problems with reading. I have worked in different countries, but this is the first time I have encountered something like this.

The driver told me about clan wars. About how houses are burned there and neighbors are killed. I myself saw how people walk on the streets with machetes. Some carry “barrels”, strange “guns” with them. I have seen fights on the roads. Some kind of primitive way of life.

One day I was driving and noticed a smoldering village. I asked the locals what happened. They waved their hand: everything was fine, nothing special, neighbors from another village just came and burned the houses. For them this is par for the course.

We lived in a camp, from where we were taken to work on drilling rigs. We traveled by bus under guard. We arrived at 6 am. One day, one of the foreigners noticed that a local worker had an incomprehensible object sticking out from under his uniform. It turned out that the man had brought a sawn-off shotgun with him. He was tied up. He later calmly admitted that he had planned to kill one of the members of the rival clan who was working on the rig.

I often observed fights between locals at the site. By the end of the second year of the business trip I got used to it and didn’t react.

— Are there police there, are they investigating crimes?

– There are police. As the locals explained to me, the police have almost unlimited power and they are feared. Lynchings occurred frequently. If the policeman decides that you are guilty, then you are guilty. All. There is no point in arguing. Above the police is the army, we also often met these guys. Everyone was afraid of them.

— Weren’t you afraid to live there?

“We had high safety standards. A prerequisite is to travel only with an escort. We had no right to leave the camp where foreigners were accommodated. Yes, they didn’t let us out of there. The camp was surrounded by a three-meter fence with barbed wire, and there were guards along the entire perimeter. If we went out, we were always accompanied by armed people. For two years, no incidents with foreigners occurred.

— Is it also unsafe in the capital?

— I’ve only been to the capital a few times. We were accommodated in a hotel for foreigners. It was also not recommended to leave there. There were rumors that foreigners once went to a local bar and were beaten and robbed.

— Cannibalism is practiced among the New Guineans. Did your driver talk about this?

“My driver once honestly admitted that he had tried human flesh. He didn’t deny that almost all the locals had eaten people at some point.

– Under what circumstances did he try?

“I was so confused by his answer that I didn’t want to develop the topic, considering that we were alone in the car. You never know… He also said that people in the region disappeared without a trace. I remembered how two Chinese came to their province and decided to open a store, like doing business. They didn’t work for a week and disappeared. There was a noise, the police, consulate staff, and the army arrived. No traces were found. Local witnesses are so-so. They have one excuse for everything: people were stolen by evil spirits. In general, if something so incomprehensible happened, then the spirits are to blame. Although everyone understood perfectly well that the Chinese were either eaten or killed. But the Papuans talked so persistently about spirits that the police probably thought: ah… spirits, okay, okay.

“The money was spent on alcohol and cigarettes”

— Do Papuans know how people live in civilized countries, how do they watch the Internet?

— They know about the Internet. But when I lived there, they used push-button phones. Although we had the Internet in the camp, I did not notice that the Papuans used it. So that you understand the level of education: when I said that I came from Russia, they rolled their eyes – they say, where is this? Their geographic knowledge is limited to New Guinea, Australia because that’s the country that actually controls all their resources, and they know Indonesia, which borders them.

– What do they spend their money on?

“I don’t know how much they earned, I think it wasn’t much.” We spent on phones and cigarettes – they are expensive there. A pack cost 20 dollars. They bought alcohol that they themselves sold. It’s difficult to say what else they were spent on. They didn’t bother with clothes. If they had to go somewhere through villages, then the most necessary places were covered with leaves.

— Do they also drink?

“In addition to alcohol, they constantly chewed narcotic nuts. Even while working. They advised me. I refused. As I understand it, it causes hallucinations. The nut was sold everywhere and was affordable. Once we were driving with a driver, and he offered to stop and buy something. I wasn’t ready to take risks. The effect of this nut was immediately noticeable, the person’s eyes became red, it was clear that he was inadequate. I don’t know how long this condition lasted. But even if this was the effect on the locals, and they have been using this nut since birth, I can imagine what could have happened to a foreigner.

— Does the state care about these people?

– Hardly. For example, where I lived, a school was built, but there were no hospitals. Papuans are treated with herbs. Life expectancy is low due to unsanitary conditions. People hardly wash themselves. We had a canteen on the territory of the base; a man stood at the entrance and checked that everyone was washing their hands. It’s scary to even think about their toilets.

— Were you treated there?

— There was a more or less normal first-aid post on the territory of the camp. They gave us pills. This is also a region where malaria is common. We were required to take medications that prevent infection. In any case, if a mosquito bites you, you will suffer a mild form of the disease. At first I took these pills, I thought that malaria was almost a fatal disease. It turned out that this was not the case. One doctor was shocked when he found out that I was constantly taking medications that were destroying my liver. And I quit.

Some colleagues suffered from malaria, but without death. The main thing is to diagnose it in time and not confuse malaria with the flu, they have similar symptoms.

“They don’t know any other life”

— Papuans don’t think about changing their lives, do they participate in elections?

— In my opinion, they are not interested in any elections there. Rumor has it that some people don’t even have passports. Where I lived, there is no concept of “personal identification.” All needs are at a basic level. In the capital and in another large city, there is some kind of civilization, there are factories. But the rest of the country is a jungle.

— Does it feel really wild there?

— Everything is very primitive there. People live by subsistence farming, building houses from scrap materials. Everything that grows is used in construction. The roofs are made from leaves that are plucked from trees. There are no paved roads on the project where I worked. I saw only one brick building there, it was a school. Such a building was considered almost a luxury for them.

– Do they complain about this life?

“They don’t know any other life.” When it comes to politics, they don’t really like Australians. Because it is the country that essentially controls them. New Guinea has enormous resources, crazy gas deposits, unreal volumes, and all this belongs to Australia. For as long as I have been working in the oil industry, I have never seen anything like it anywhere in the world. Even uneducated Papuans understand such things and are indignant that the gas belongs to them, but they have nothing from it.

— Did you make good money there?

— The salaries were very high, no one complained. I got 20 thousand dollars a month. But the prices there are also high. In the capital, everything is 2–3 times more expensive than in Moscow. Be that as it may, I would continue to work there, I liked it: beautiful places, nature, in addition to the jungle there are mountains, birds of paradise, parrots flying. But in 2015 there was a crisis, oil prices fell. With the low price of oil, there was no reason for mining companies to stay there. The project was closed. Although I heard that now they are going to resume something there again.

— You are currently working in Saudi Arabia. How do you like it there after New Guinea?

— The country is rich, it is changing for the better, it is becoming more open. But my salary in Saudi Arabia was half that of Papua. In the oil industry there is a concept called the country coefficient, which depends on the political situation and how safe it is to be in the state. Papua New Guinea was considered a red zone, the most dangerous, hence the high salaries. If you go to Europe, they have the lowest salaries in our industry.