The Hidden Valley gold and silver mine in Papua New Guinea has polluted the Watut river with acid forming rocks and soils. The increased sediment flows in the river have impacted the lives of thousands of people living downstream of the mine. Gardens have been flooded and destroyed, incomes from alluvial mining have plummeted, fish and other aquatic life, an important food source for local people, has been killed.

But there is no legal sanction for the mining company, jointly owned by Harmony Gold and Newcrest Mining. 

Its executives continue to fly around the world in business class luxury, its managers live in air conditioned comfort while local villages have no electricity, sanitation or running water. 

Meanwhile frustrated local people, forced to seek compensation and restitution through a court system heavily biased against them grow increasingly angry at the indifference to their suffering from the mining companies, politicians and bureaucrats. 

The people request mining company permission to send a scientist into the mine site to collect water samples so they can learn more about what is happening to their river but are refused. The Department of Conservation pays tens of thousands of dollars to a foreign consultancy company to report on the pollution, but local people are refused a copy of the scientists report.

Then the mining company sends it own officers into communities to collect their own river water samples. The officers have no rights to enter the land. The mining companies don't ask permission. The officers are trespassing but come with a police escort.

Local people, seemingly defenseless and abandoned against another invasion from the mining company, stone the miners vehicle and smash a windscreen. Retribution is immediate, arrests, criminal charges, fines and then imprisonment.

The mining company has caused millions of kina in damage to the property of indigenous landowners. Has severely impacted on the lives of thousands of people. But the law and the State turns a blind eye to this criminal damage on a huge scale.

The angry, frustrated, abandoned indigenous VICTIMS strike back with the only weapons they have, stones picked from the ground. They cause a few thousand kina of damage to a car windscreen and they are arrested, charged, fined, imprisoned.

Where is the justice?