Biden wrong to call us cannibals, says Papua New Guinea PM
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Papua New Guinea’s prime minister has rubbished claims by Joe Biden that his uncle was eaten by cannibals in the Pacific island nation, accusing the US president of having a “blurry moment”.
James Marape said his country had been unfairly characterised after Mr Biden claimed his serviceman uncle was eaten after his plane crashed there during the Second World War.
Mr Marape urged the United States government to instead focus on clearing up dangerous live munitions, ship and plane wrecks that were still littering the South Pacific almost 80 years after the end of the war.
Mr Biden had “appeared to imply his uncle was eaten by cannibals after his plane was shot down over PNG during WWII”, Mr Marape’s office said in a statement late on Sunday.
“President Biden’s remarks may have been a slip of the tongue; however, my country does not deserve to be labelled as such,” it added.
The statement was issued after Mr Biden recounted the story last week at an event in Pittsburgh. He told the crowd that the US was unable to recover his uncle Ambrose Finnegan’s remains after his plane was lost.
“And my uncle, they called him – Ambrose, they called him Bosie… and he became an Army Air Corps, before the Air Force came along, he flew those single engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones,” Mr Biden said, according to CNN.
“And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be a lot of cannibals – for real – in that part of New Guinea.”
The official account of Finnegan’s death, published in the US by the Defence POW/MIA Accounting agency, says his A-20 Havoc was “forced to ditch in the ocean near the island’s coastline “for unknown reasons”.
The US president’s controversial comments come at a sensitive time in US-PNG relations, as Washington tries to court it and other Pacific island nations to compete with China’s growing influence in the region.
Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, met with Mr Marape on Sunday as part of an effort by Beijing to build closer economic ties, while Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister, arrives this week to commemorate World War II.
The US signed a defence cooperation pact with Papua New Guinea last year.
In a separate interview, Mr Marape clarified that Mr Biden’s remarks would not significantly damage diplomatic relations as there were “deeper values in our relationship than one statement, one word, one punchline.”
The prime minister attributed the incident to a “loose” and “blurry moment” but stressed that his administration wanted “the White House to look into cleaning up these remains of WWII so the truth about missing servicemen like Ambrose Finnegan can be put to rest.”
