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Appendix 1: The Raid on the Three-Mile Guesthouse, March 2004

On March 12, 2004, at around 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon, armed mobile squad officers burst into the Three-Mile Guesthouse in Port Moresby, where a live band was playing.446 Present were sex workers and their clients, band members, women selling betel nut, food, and drinks, and others listening to the band.

Nearly thirty witnesses testified that the officers rounded up all of the women; hit some of them with sticks, bottles, iron bars, gun butts and rubber hoses; poured cooked food, beer, and soft drinks on them; and spit red betel nut juice on them.447 One woman told Human Rights Watch that a policeman hit her with his gun butt on her vagina, “then put it in my bum.”448 Another officer, she said, “pissed into a half-full beer and made us drink a sip.” A sixteen-year-old girl told Human Rights Watch that as police officers rounded her up, one shouted: “We want the youngest ones to have sex in front of all of us. . . . Have sex right in front of our eyes. We want to see the real action.”449 One woman told a National AIDS Council official shortly after the raid that eight to ten officers forced her into another room at gunpoint, made her to take off her jeans and her underwear, ordered her to open her legs, and pushed a “freshner can” into her vagina.450 When she shouted, she later reported, the officers whipped her with a rubber hose. One policeman put an empty beer bottle into her vagina.451 According to her statement, another policeman then “pointed a pistol on my head and asked me to suck his penis. He pulled his penis out and forced me by holding a pistol on my head.” They then ordered her to put on her trousers and join the others, she reported.452

More than twenty girls and women each reported that police ordered them to chew, and in many cases, swallow, up to four condoms.453 “They forced me to open my mouth and checked to see if I had swallowed them,” one girl told Human Rights Watch.454 Many were also forced to blow up condoms like balloons and hold them as they were marched through the streets to the Boroko police station, where they were met by local newspaper and television reporters.455 Along the way, police and bystanders hit the marchers, threw objects at them, and shouted things such as, “Look! These are the real AIDS carriers.”456

At the station, police forced those arrested to sit in front of the station. According to an NGO representative present at the time, Superintendent Emmanuel Hela, the metropolitan commander, spoke to the group about HIV/AIDS, stating that his men performed the raid to prevent sex workers from contracting or spreading HIV.457 Police then charged around forty people, including nine girls, with “living on the earnings of prostitution” and locked them in cells.458 According to NGO staff present and the women and girls, the police provided no food or medical care, although some were bleeding and “one women’s hipbone had been chipped from being beaten by rifle butts.”459 A seventeen-year-old girl explained to Human Rights Watch how she felt at the time: “I was all wet and my clothes were smelly.” Everyone, she said, was covered with food, betel nut spit, beer, and soft drinks. “It smelled really bad and was uncomfortable.”460

That night, police officers took at least four girls out of their cell and pack raped them.461

After two nights in detention, the women and girls were released on their own recognizance, with staff of the National AIDS Council and others signing as guarantors.462

On March 16, the director of the National AIDS Council called a press conference at which speakers condemned the police’s actions and stated that they were counterproductive to the fight against AIDS.463 On March 17, the National Capital District Provincial AIDS Committee held a meeting of government representatives and civil society organizations calling for a public inquiry and a protest march.464 In April, the charges against the women and girls were dropped.  In August, protestors delivered a petition to the Prime Minister calling for, among other things, the police commissioner to take action against the police officers involved in the raid, for policemen to wear identification with their regiment number and names and to not be on duty while intoxicated, for the victims desks at police stations be fully resourced, and for a human rights commission to be established.465

The Individual and Community Rights Advocacy Forum (ICRAF) served notice on the Solicitor General’s office on August 6, 2004, of the intention to lodge a claim against the state for human rights abuses on behalf of women and girls arrested and detained during the raid.466 On September 1, 2004, the solicitor general replied to the organization with a letter stating that he accepted notice as sufficient but requesting “further particulars as to who and which policemen were supposedly involved” on the grounds that this was the intention of section 5 of the Claims By and Against the State Act.467

The Ombudsman’s Commission also initiated an inquiry into the role of the police in the raid. The inquiry was still pending more than one year later.




[446] An undated, handwritten statement of facts on stationary of the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary, a copy of which was obtained by Human Rights Watch, lists inspectors Bore and Florian, of a mobile squad, as witnesses to the raid. See also “Statement of Facts on Police Raid at 3-Mile Guesthouse 12 March 2004 and related incidents,” signed by Hersey, p. 1.

[447] Human Rights Watch individual interviews with three of the women and girls present during the raid, Port Moresby, September 15, 2004; individual, signed “Statement of Facts” from twenty-six women and girls and one man, made between March 12 and March 20, 2004.

[448] Human Rights Watch interview with women arrested during the Three-Mile Guesthouse raid, Port Moresby, September 15, 2004.

[449] Human Rights Watch interview with girl arrested during the Three-Mile Guesthouse raid, Port Moresby, September 15, 2004.

[450] “Statement of Facts” from twenty-three-year-old woman, recorded by Bomal Gonapa, Policy and Legal Advisor, National AIDS Council, March 18, 2004 (name withheld, on file with Human Rights Watch).

[451] Another women arrested in the raid told Human Rights Watch: “At the guesthouse, a policeman took an iced beer bottle and pushed it into one lady’s vagina. She told me that during the raid the policeman had sex with her and then put a beer bottle in her. She told me this while we were marching.” Human Rights Watch interview with eighteen-year-old woman, Port Moresby, September 15, 2004.

[452] “Statement of Facts” from twenty-three-year-old woman, recorded by Gonapa, National AIDS Council, March 18, 2004.

[453] Human Rights Watch individual interviews with three of the women and girls arrested during the Three-Mile Guesthouse raid, Port Moresby, September 15, 2004; individual “Statement of Facts” from twenty-one women and girls, made between March 12 and March 20, 2004.

[454] Human Rights Watch interview with seventeen-year-old girl, Port Moresby, September 15, 2004.

[455] See individual “Statement of Facts” from women and girls, made between March 12 and March 20, 2004; and “Statement of Facts on Police Raid at 3-Mile Guesthouse 12 March 2004 and related incidents,” signed by Hersey, p. 1.

[456] Ibid.; and Human Rights Watch interview with eighteen-year-old woman arrested during the Three-Mile Guesthouse raid, Port Moresby, September 15, 2004.

[457] “Statement of Facts on Police Raid at 3-Mile Guesthouse 12 March 2004 and related incidents,” signed by Hersey, p. 2.

[458] See ibid; and list of forty-one women and girls arrested in the raid on Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary stationary, labeled “charged for living on the Earnings of Prostition[sic] Sect – 55(1) SOA” (on file with Human Rights Watch).

[459] “Statement of Facts on Police Raid at 3-Mile Guesthouse 12 March 2004 and related incidents,” signed by Hersey, p. 1.

[460] Human Rights Watch interview with seventeen-year-old woman arrested during the Three-Mile Guesthouse raid, Port Moresby, September 15, 2004.

[461] One of the four girls whom the police took out told us:

The policemen came into the cell and said, “We’re going to have sex with you.” Some of the girls were scared and crying. I was one of the four but they dropped me off and took the other three. . . . They took them to the hill in town and raped them there and then brought them back to the cells. The police were in two vehicles with three girls and all of the police had their turn. After raping them, they dropped them back at the cell. After that, the three girls told us what the police did to them. One of the girls told me how the police treated her. There were two cars and the cars were full. It was dark. She said she didn’t how many men were having sex with her.

Human Rights Watch interview with sixteen-year-old girl, Port Moresby, September 15, 2004.

Another woman told us that she was in the cell with the girls when “one policeman came and got four out.” When the police brought the girls back, she said, “I asked them what did they do. They said they all had sex with the four of them—‘They lined us up to have sex.’” Human Rights Watch interview with woman arrested in the raid on the Three-Mile Guesthouse, Port Moresby, September 15, 2004.

See also “Statement of Facts” from twenty-one-year-old woman, recorded by Gonapa, National AIDS Council, March 18, 2004 (stating that on the night of March 12th, police locked her in a cell at Boroko police station with nine other women and girls, and then took six of them out of the cell) (name withheld, on file with Human Rights Watch); and “Statement of Facts on Police Raid at 3-Mile Guesthouse 12 March 2004 and related incidents,” signed by Hersey, p. 2. According to Amnesty International, police raped at least five women and girls in the station’s car park.  “Papua New Guinea,” Amnesty International Report 2005, available at http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/png-summary-eng.

[462] Thirty-eight documents entitled “Recognizance to Police for the Appearance of a Defendant,” dated March 13, 2004, all alleging charges of “prostitution” or “living on the earnings of prostitution,” requiring personal appearance at Boroko District Court on March 15, 2004, at 9:30 a.m., signed by police office N. Huhume (on file with Human Rights Watch). Although the documents were dated March 13, many or all of the women were not released until early morning of the following day. “Statement of Facts on Police Raid at 3-Mile Guesthouse 12 March 2004 and related incidents,” signed by Hersey, p. 2; and individual “Statement of Facts” from women and girls, made between March 12 and March 20, 2004.

[463] “Statement of Facts on Police Raid at 3-Mile Guesthouse 12 March 2004 and related incidents,” signed by Hersey, p. 3.

[464] Ibid.

[465] “Petition,” delivered by marchers to the Prime Minister, n.d. (on file with Human Rights Watch).

[466] Letter from Freda Talao, Chairperson, ICRAF Board, and Lady Hilan Los, Executive Director, ICRAF, to the Solicitor General, August 6, 2004.

[467] Human Rights Watch interview with Lady Hilan Los, ICRAF, Port Moresby, September 15, 2004; and letter from Francis G. Kuvi, acting solicitor general, Department of Justice and Attorney General, Office of the Solicitor General, to the Individual and Community Rights Advocacy Forum, September 1, 2004.


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