MCLEOD: In a land of ancient traditions, the mud men of Asaro Village mimic their feuding forebears disguising themselves for jungle warfare. The masks are largely ceremonial now but many beliefs haven’t changed. These men are just as superstitious as any of their ancestors in the last ten thousand years.

Across Papua New Guinea, belief in sorcery and witchcraft has never disappeared. In some places it’s making a disturbing comeback.

LADY CAROL KIDU: Sorcery has been a part of Papua New Guinea since time immemorial and belief in sorcery and sorcery can be good or bad.

MCLEOD: This is a story of two worlds colliding, of black magic, curses and evil spells. And what happens when traditional beliefs are overtaken by a new, imported form of spirituality. It’s a story also about how those beliefs are used more and more to justify violence and payback.

To an outsider life in the remote mountains of Simbu Province might seem as idyllic as it gets but something sinister is happening here. Police officers Tamgo Nime and Michael Awagl have arrived in the village of Womatne on a murder investigation. The killers have long fled but the detectives know practically every villager is an accomplice in some way.

TAMGO NIME: [Talking to the crowd] I will come to you, you will help me and I will help you. We will work together to try and get hold of some men who we think are behind this death of Vero.

MCLEOD: Vero was a middle aged woman beaten to death as these people watched. The whole village supported her killing. Under duress, Vero told her torturers she was a witch who cast spells.

The villages told me they blamed Vero for the death of a seminary student. Although doctors said the young man died of cancer, people here claim Vero cursed him after the two became bogged down in a land dispute.

RUDOLPH: They were frustrated and they chopped another old woman because they believe in sorcery. They got a butcher knife and chopped through the neck and she was dumped in the toilet.

TAMGO NIME: She is just buried from here. You can see it up there.

MCLEOD: What happens in the village usually stays in the village. Detective Nime knows he can expect little cooperation. Most cases involving sorcery are not reported at all.

TAMGO NIME: Once they eliminate the sorcerer they feel safe because they are saving other human beings too. That’s what they believe in.

FATHER PHIL GIBBS: Someone dies and then people will start talking and then someone will start whispering and saying well you know, it might be this person.

MCLEOD: Catholic Priest Phil Gibbs has spent thirty years studying spirituality in Papua New Guinea.

FATHER PHIL GIBBS: So always if misfortune happens, and particularly death, people are looking for a reason. There’s got to be a reason for it. It doesn’t just happen for no reason.

MCLEOD: But in Womatne Village, the crowd has turned on police.

VILLAGE CHIEF ROBERT: I’m sorry to say that you are late. Five months.

MCLEOD: The villagers show no remorse for killing Vero. Their real regret is that police weren’t here months ago to investigate the claims she was a sorcerer.

In villages and towns, sorcery offers an explanation for the seemingly inexplicable. Those accursed for casting spells are often elderly women with little economic value to the village.

LADY CAROL KIDU: The village we’re sitting in now, even though it’s an urban village, part of the capital city of the country, people here still believe very strongly in sorcery.

MCLEOD: Lady Carol Kidu is Papua New Guinea’s Minister for Welfare, a former Queenslander who’s now the only woman in the PNG Parliament.

LADY CAROL KIDU: When you have a society like ours with the complexity of hundreds and hundreds of ethnic groups coming into contact with each other and that in itself, that confusing melting pot, coming into contact with globalised culture, coming into contact with religions from elsewhere which are different from the traditional animistic beliefs, it’s a very confusing situation.

MCLEOD: Perturbed by growing violence Lady Kidu is encouraging villagers to be upfront about sorcery. Her interest is understandable. Ten years ago her husband, a former Chief Justice died suddenly. Lady Kidu had to deal with claims he had been cursed.

LADY CAROL KIDU: Still a very, very large number of people believe he was killed by sorcery. People of all levels of education, even one of my own children although we know that clinically he died of a heart attack and we accept that. There is always the question but what caused the heart attack when he was, by all appearances well and had been declared well by doctors.

MCLEOD: In its quest to curb sorcery related violence, the nations lawmakers have banned evil curses although it’s still legal here to cast good spells. The Sorcery Act makes it an offence to even claim to have magic powers for harmful practice. In trying to regulate the supernatural, PNG’s leaders want to stem malicious attacks by those who use sorcery as an excuse to kill.

Highlands social worker Doreen Ale is taking the rare step of prosecuting her attackers. She was tortured with a hot iron after being accused of cursing a man killed in a car accident. The culprits, among them her brother-in-law, wanted her to name others.

DOREEN ALE: They sting me. Hit my back you know. They came at me with a spade, you tell us otherwise we’ll cut your neck off. And they were saying all sorts of things but I was a brave woman. I know I haven’t done anything wrong so why will I mention innocent people’s names because I don’t know.

MCLEOD: Act of violence can be prosecuted but outlawing genuine belief is more difficult.

FATHER PHIL GIBBS: In most villages you would have people who the villagers would know have certain powers for healing or for making people sick. You would get the body parts of a person or the effigy of a person and then you would do harm to that. It’s a form of magic. You would burn it or do something to it and it’s believed that then that would affect the person who is maybe hundreds of kilometres away.

MCLEOD: In a place where revenge and payback have always been a feature of life, sorcery has become a convenient pretext for violence. Increasingly the young and often displaced, gang together to dispense their own brand of injustice.

Tai Miugla was set upon because he was walking around at night, only days after his brother’s death. His attackers told him he was behaving like a sorcerer.

TAI MIUGLA: I made this short prayer and they chopped me with fourteen bush knives all over my body and they also chopped three of my fingers and I thought I was dead. They killed me and they threw me in the bush.

MCLEOD: Tai and his family have come to the man known as the peacemaker of Simbu Province. Papa Mondo brings feuding parties together and settles disputes on a village level. He’s arranged for Tai’s attackers to pay compensation of pigs and money. And he has advice for those he counsels. He tells them to give up traditional beliefs for Christianity.

PAPA MONDO: Now the Simbu mediation says you must go to church and the Simbu police also say that you must go to church.

MCLEOD: In the isolated mountain village of Boon Boon, worshipers praise a spirit their ancestors first heard about when missionaries passed through here.

PASTOR GEDISA: [To congregation] God who provides, God you big fella.

MCLEOD: Visiting Pastor Hati Gedisa appeals to them to embrace salvation and turn away from a dark past.

PASTOR GEDISA: Hallelujah. Make them good… healing and continue to flow inside the family unit and start to flow down the road and then touch the neighbour and your family and even down to the next village, hallelujah.

MCLEOD: His message is timely. In between going to church, these people organised their young men to raid a neighbouring village and hack to death an accused sorcerer.

PASTOR GEDISA: Amen. With Jesus on my side I’m a winner man. With Jesus I am victorious.

MCLEOD: These two young villagers were accomplices to the murder. They’ve just returned home after their release from prison. Pastor Gedisa now has the job of counselling them. The young offenders must also go to church as part of their parole. Conversion seems to be working. The young offenders have renounced their belief in sorcery.

YOUNG OFFENDER: When we were in gaol, we did our time. We learned some good things in gaol. We did not know much about the word of God.

MCLEOD: But Paster Gedisa’s work hasn’t finished yet. Unsettled by the knowledge that everyone supported the killing, he’s decided to broker some peacemaking. The pastor is taking Boon Boon’s chief to the village his men attacked.

Chief meets chief and spiritual reconciliation begins.

PASTOR GEDISA: We can pray. We can pray. The law and the bible go together to bring about this great peace.

MCLEOD: But the Pastor is shocked to learn that the people here condoned the attack on their own village. Chief Awa Yanom told me the murdered man deserved to die because he was a sorcerer.

CHIEF AWA YANOM: In this village everyone knows sorcery exists so when this problem arose the rest of us said it was OK too for this to be paid for.

MCLEOD: Paster this is an area where organised Christian religion has been in place for around one hundred years, yet sorcery still persists. Why is that?

PASTOR GEDISA: Because it was part of their life before Christianity came here.

FATHER PHIL GIBBS: It’s not just something that can be a change enforced from the outside, like you know saying to someone well you know you go to church or something like that. It’s got to be a change which affects people’s understanding of themselves, people’s understanding of why things happen um and therefore it’s, it involves a whole spirituality. It involves a whole conversion I suppose.

MCLEOD: In the villages ceremonial hunters confront the devil and defeat evil. It’s not unlike the message these same people hear in church each Sunday.

LADY CAROL KIDU: One of the biggest issues of development of this country is mindset change, attitudinal changes to bring people forward and not lose the best of the past you know? We want to get the best of the old and the best of the new if possible but that’s a very difficult balance to reach in any society, not just Papua New Guinea.

MCLEOD: A nation with eight hundred languages has become snagged in a cultural divide. Greater mobility and intermarriage between tribes and provinces has seen the spread of spiritual beliefs. But those beliefs have become blurred and distorted and the clash between traditional thinking and values from a new age.