Is Bougainville about to be the world’s newest nation?

Bougainville could soon become the world’s newest nation, three decades after a brutal civil war, and seven years since the resource-rich islands overwhelmingly voted to secede from Papua New Guinea.

Parliamentarians in Papua New Guinea will vote next month on whether to grant independence to the autonomous and ethnically distinct islands that are home to around 350,000 people.

Civil war to referendum

After years of being controlled by colonising nations as various as Britain, Germany, Australia and Japan, Bougainville first declared its independence – as the Republic of the North Solomons – in 1975. Within weeks, however, it was incorporated into the newly independent nation of Papua New Guinea.

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In the following decades, the islands’ politics, and push for greater autonomy, became inextricably linked to its vast Panguna copper and gold mine. Anger that less than 2% of the wealth generated by the internationally run concession went to the local community “spiralled into a decade-long civil war in the main island’s jungles, as a rag-tag separatist militia held Papua New Guinea’s military at bay”, said The New York Times.

“The Crisis”, as it is now known, lasted from 1988 to 1998, and “left as many as 15,000 people dead, and displaced a generation, while cementing Bougainville’s desires for independence”.

A peace agreement in 2001 formally brought fighting to an end. It established a measure of autonomy for Bougainville and, crucially, a commitment from Papua New Guinea to allow an independence referendum. This was held in 2019, and 97.7% of Bougainvilleans voted for independence. Under the terms of the peace agreement, and the constitution, the result must be ratified by Papua New Guinea’s parliament in Port Moresby before it can take effect.

Economic self-reliance

Port Moresby has “long resisted acting on Bougainville’s post-conflict independence”, said The Guardian. The government is keen “not to establish a precedent for the break-up Papua New Guinea’s vast and culturally diverse archipelago, or to lose a resource-rich and potentially lucrative province”.

Parliament is slated to begin voting on the issue on 24 November. But, after the threshold for ratification was raised from the usual two-thirds to three-quarters of all MPs, Bougainville’s Attorney General, Ezekiel Masatt, denounced the “national government strategy to poison the waters and make it impossible to come close to reach the voting threshold”.

Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape has argued that Bougainville does not have the economic resources to be able to stand on its own feet. He has mooted the idea of “allowing for a period of time in which the region works on developing that economic self-reliance before the parliament might then revisit the question of political independence”, said Radio New Zealand.

Many Bougainvilleans think that the route to economic self-reliance lies in “rehabilitating” the Panguna copper mine, which was closed by multiple acts of sabotage in 1989. Bougainville’s President Ishmael Toroama is already pursuing the redevelopment of Panguna, and has signalled his intention to “separate from the state of Papua New Guinea” in 2030, regardless of whether Port Moresby ratifies Bougainville’s independence or not.