The “hiremen” inside PNG’s market for Highlands violence

In August 2023, a video circulated widely on Papua New Guinean social media showing naked and mutilated corpses being dragged behind a vehicle along a Highlands highway. Police in Enga confirmed that the dead were hired gunmen – hiremen – brought in by one tribal group to attack another, ambushed and killed. Enga’s police commander George Kakas described what he was witnessing as “a new and evil phenomenon," warning that businessmen, politicians, and educated elites were bankrolling the violence.

While right to be alarmed, the phenomenon Kakas was describing is not new. What is new is its scale, its integration into the political economy of the Highlands, and its transformation from an improvised response to local contestation into an organised market for violence. Understanding the conditions that produced – and now sustain – the hireman is essential for anyone trying to understand and intervene in the complex and combustible security situation across much of PNG’s Upper Highlands.

Inter-group conflict has always been part of Highlands social life. Land disputes, marriage grievances, and inter-clan competition have generated warfare across the region for generations. But violence operated under customary constraint. Combat was bounded – confined to recognised battlefields, governed by unwritten rules that generally protected women and children, and subject to the authority of Big Men who could broker peace and organise compensation. Violence was embedded in community life and, to a degree, regulated by it.

The introduction of modern firearms from the mid-1980s onwards dismantled those constraints. The incidence of armed conflict in Enga province is estimated to have nearly doubled every five years between 1991 and 2005 following the arrival of guns. Lethality increased sharply. Conflicts escalated faster than traditional peacemaking could respond, and the equivalence logic underlying customary compensation – which required losses to be roughly balanced before reconciliation could proceed – became increasingly difficult to sustain when a single ambush could cause multiple casualties.

It was in this environment that the hireman emerged as a distinct figure.

Bootlegged copies of the Rambo film series circulated in remote communities during the 1990s, functioning as a cultural primer on automatic weapons. “Rambo” entered Tok Pisin as a term for a paid outside fighter – someone brought in to reinforce a group’s fighting capacity with no kinship stake in the dispute – as M16s and other military-grade weapons proliferated through notoriously leaky state armouries.

What distinguishes contemporary hiremen from earlier forms of inter-group conflict is the extent to which violence has become explicitly monetised and embedded in elite patronage networks. The financing of armed conflict in the Highlands does not originate primarily within the communities that do the fighting. It flows downward from politicians, businessmen, and connected elites – many based in Port Moresby or other urban centres – who mobilise kinship networks to funnel weapons, ammunition, and cash into conflict zones.

Enga’s police commander described a system in which “business and educated elites and well-to-do people are funding these activities, to hire gunmen and purchase ammunition”. Tok Pisin phrases map the same logic with striking precision: Pait i gat papa – gan igat papa (“the fight has a father, the gun has a father”). In the community understanding of this system, primary agency rests not with the man who pulls the trigger but with the person who finances and supplies the means.

The Highlands hiremen are a relatively recent addition to the complex socio-political fabric of local and national politics. Political power and money have come to determine how hiremen are used during increasingly volatile national elections, serving as tools of intimidation and coercion among the multiple candidates and their followers vying for electoral wins and the access to public resources those wins provide. At the end of elections, hiremen return to their communities and continue the cycle of violence. Elections are not simply moments when existing conflicts intensify; they are funding events – occasions when elite investment in hired violence peaks and the hireman economy is at its most visible and lucrative.

The hireman does not emerge from a vacuum. He is typically a young man for whom the gun economy offers something that the formal economy cannot: income, status, and recognition. He is the product of the collapse of meaningful educational and employment pathways, the erosion of traditional authority structures, and the emergence of gun-enabled forms of masculinity that compete with older pathways. The result has been more indiscriminate and deadly warfare, claiming more civilian lives – a deeper societal breakdown in which traditional authority is weakening and external factors are worsening internal disputes.

Research has found that gun ownership has been absorbed into systems of meaning about manhood, status, and belonging. This shift occurred in Enga as early as 2005: where once Big Men – earning authority through oratory, generosity, and community leadership – governed the decision to fight, now “the few young men who possess guns make the decision whether to go and fight or not”. The authority of elders has been displaced by the authority of the armed young man – a figure who has found one of the few available routes to power in a setting where more legitimate routes have largely closed.

The hireman economy endures because it is self-reinforcing. Insecurity drives demand for weapons; weapons drive demand for ammunition and mercenaries; profits and power attract more participants. State fragility and arms proliferation operate as a feedback loop: communities arm themselves because the state cannot protect them, and armed communities then further undermine the state’s capacity to govern. PNG’s police-to-population ratio has deteriorated significantly since independence and now sits far below UN-recommended benchmarks. Police stations have been abandoned, courts are non-functional, and district offices closed across much of the Upper Highlands. Security forces that do arrive are frequently outgunned.

The wantok system – ordinarily a source of social solidarity and mutual obligation – reinforces the cycle in conflict settings: communities press relatives in paid employment to help finance weapons as a collective obligation, and those who refuse face ostracism and social exclusion.

The hireman is thus not merely a product of individual economic desperation. He is produced by a system of communal obligation, elite patronage, governance breakdown, and a labour market that the formal economy has failed to compete with.

The picture is not uniformly grim. Evidence from specific communities and local organisations – for example, Kup Women for Peace in Simbu province – demonstrates that the cycle can be interrupted where credible leadership, genuine economic alternatives, and community ownership of peace processes converge. The common logic is simple: offering young men something worth choosing over the gun. Providing these alternatives and drawing hiremen out of the market is urgent ahead of the next round of elections.

For the first time in years, the policy conditions appear more favourable. The Marape government has committed to action on arms proliferation; a gun buy-back scheme was announced in March 2026; and a National Action Plan on Reducing Armed Violence is in development. That the people who most need to solve this problem include some of those who have been funding it remains the central political challenge. The analytical starting point matters: the hireman is a symptom of a system, not its cause. Addressing the symptom without dismantling the patronage networks, closing the governance vacuum, and creating credible alternatives will not produce durable change.

The fight, as communities across the Highlands have long understood, has a father or owner, probably many. Finding them – and holding them accountable – is where any serious response must begin.