By Martyn Namorong

This piece gets its title from the poem What’s Genocide by Carlos Andrés Gómez. Carlos’ insight into genocide is very profound once one reflects on the reality of today’s world.

The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide defines genocide in Article II:

"Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article III: The following acts shall be punishable:

1. Genocide;
2. 
Conspiracy to commit genocide;
3. 
Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(
4. Attempt to commit genocide;

5. Complicity in genocide. 

When one looks at the definition above, it is amazing how so many events past and present, don’t get called genocide. So in the poem What’s Genocide, Carlos asks us to re-examine ‘everyday’ issues that people would not necessarily call genocide.

And so what’s Genocide in PNG?

If one has to ask whether or not there is genocide in PNG one has to pick out a definition from Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, and ask whether any of the acts mentioned in that Article are being committed with the intention of destroying whole or part of an ethnical group.

And it is this issue of “intention of destroying whole or part of an ethnical group” that Carlos Andrés Gómez turns on its head. For Carlos, whether intentional or not genocide seems to be happening every day.

In What’s Genocide, Carlos writes

they won’t let you hear the truth at school


if that person says “fuck”


can’t even talk about “fuck”


even though a third of your senior class


is pregnant.

......

I met an 11-year-old gang member in the Bronx

who carries
a semi-automatic weapon to study hall

so he can make it home


and you want me to censor my language

If you asked me;

I’d say the system won’t let me call what is happening in my country genocide.

The system would say what I call genocide is not legally defined as genocide.

So Mr. Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, listen to what this street boy has to say:

Thousands of women die each year at childbirth

– that is genocide

Hundreds of thousands of children can’t get a decent education

– that is genocide

The Environment Act allows miners to pollute the land sea and sky of my people

– that is genocide

The Fly River, The Watut River and the Angabanga River have been destroyed affecting thousands of lives

– that is genocide

The people of Pogera and Kurumbakari have been uprooted by the mines

– that is genocide

They want to mine the sea bed and dump their mine wastes into the Bismarck Sea

– that is genocide

They took away over 4 million hectares of land from my people

– that is genocide

The Churches have become powerful landlords; disenfranchising indigenous tribes

– that is genocide

Why can’t we call it Genocide or mention the word “fuck” in schools even though most teenagers in schools have already “fucked”? Is it because it’s unchristian to use the word ‘fuck’? Is it because it’s illegal to call it genocide?

You see where I am coming from Mr. Prime Minister. They don’t call it what it is and they don’t want you to call it what it is so that you remain blind and blindly prop up their commercial, religious and temporal empires.

Carlos says they con you and insult you that’s why they’re known as the consultants. If you consult the people who con and insult you, how can you expect salvation?

call themselves “World History” and don’t mention


King Leopold or diamond mines


call themselves “Politics in the Modern World”


and don’t mention Apartheid