‘For the past few decades, the United States has beaten a gradual retreat from the South Pacific. Given the aggressive manoeuvres of China in the region, that path must obviously be reversed.’
Within the next few months, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to visit Papua New Guinea (PNG). It will be a first for an Indian Prime Minister and the visit is keenly anticipated in the country of around 9 million people.
A determining issue in the future of PNG is the country’s relationship with the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. In this edition of “Indo-Pacific: Behind the Headlines”, we spoke with John D. Kuhns, who has lived and worked in Bougainville since 2015 and is the author of “They Call Me Ishmael”, a novel about Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama.
Q: What’s going on in Bougainville now?
A: Until recently, those who were familiar with Bougainville knew it as a South Pacific archipelago ravaged by “The Crisis”, the term Bougainvilleans use to describe the civil war with their parent government Papua New Guinea (PNG) that took place from 1989 to 1998. In this brutal conflagration—the most destructive in the Pacific region since World War II—approximately 20,000 Bougainvilleans died.
Bougainville’s booming economy, the most prosperous of any region in PNG at the time due to the huge Panguna Mine, collapsed and lay in ruins.
It has taken a while, but those who visit Bougainville today might notice a whiff of optimism in the air emanating from the heady elixir of independence.
The Crisis ended with the signing of the Bougainville Peace Agreement in 2001, in which Bougainville remained part of PNG as an autonomous region with its own Constitution but was granted the right within 20 years to conduct an independence referendum.
In December 2019, the referendum took place. 97.7% of registered Bougainvilleans chose independence over staying part of PNG. The event was transformational. For the first time, people stopped identifying themselves by their villages; now, they are more likely to think of themselves as Bougainvilleans.
Paying for independence will be expensive and difficult, but not impossible. Unlike many South Pacific comparables, Bougainville is richly endowed with resources.
The Panguna Mine, which operated from 1972 until 1989 and today remains closed, still contains copper, gold, and silver ore worth over $100 billion. It is only one of several areas of potentially promising mineral deposits in Bougainville. The land also hosts significant gardens of coconut palms, cacao trees, and forests of exotic hardwoods. Bougainville’s waters teem with fish.
However, Bougainville has been slow to emerge from the fog of war. To rebuild, Bougainvilleans need all the help they can get.
Q: What is the current situation/timeline in regards to Bougainville independence?
A: The results of the December 2019 independence referendum are not binding on PNG. According to the Bougainville Peace Agreement, the members of PNG’s Parliament have the right to approve, or disapprove, Bougainville’s decision to leave PNG.
Sentiments as to how PNG’s members will vote are wide-ranging. “Let them go,” the man on the street is likely to say, while some Members of Parliament bloviate more political statements.
The respective leaders of the two governments—Ishmael Toroama, the President of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville and James Marape, the Prime Minister of PNG—have met every 90 days in what are called Joint Supervisory Board meetings supervised by United Nations advisors to negotiate the arrangements.
Toroama has gone on record that he wants Bougainville to be independent by September 2025, while Marape has indicated that if his Parliament were to approve independence, 2027 is a more reasonable timeframe.
Q: What is popular sentiment towards independence/what are likely outcomes if independence is not achieved?
A: Toroama’s presidential campaign in 2020 was squarely based on independence. Given that winning campaign platform and the people’s overwhelmingly affirmative response to the independence referendum, his position is clear.
Furthermore, Toroama was the guerilla leader of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army, the rebel militia that in The Crisis fought the better-manned and equipped PNG Defence Force to a standstill and forced the PNG government to collapse. To do so again would be gruelling, but nothing that he and his combatants have not done before.
As for Marape, his situation today is far different that the dilemma faced by the leaders of PNG during The Crisis. Losing Bougainville and the vast wealth of the Panguna Mine would not produce the crippling loss that such an outcome represented in pre-Crisis days.
In 1989, when The Crisis erupted, the Panguna Mine was the main engine of PNG’s GDP and produced approximately one quarter of the nation’s foreign exchange. Even though the fallout of The Crisis threatened to bring down the PNG government, the inexperienced leaders (they had only been an independent nation for 14 years) had little choice. They needed to reopen the Panguna Mine, even if it meant war.
Today, with the advent of many more precious mineral mines and significant oil and gas development in PNG, even if the Panguna Mine were operating full blast it wouldn’t make a double-digit impact on PNG’s economy.
Some say that economics isn’t the issue with Bougainville’s pending departure; it’s politics. PNG was formed from an amalgam of peoples and cultures on its mainland, together with disparate groups from its far-flung islands—New Britain, New Ireland, and many more—that were glued together in a potentially shaky structure. If Bougainville were to depart, others might follow.
That concern may be worth consideration, but history reveals little evidence of loud pleadings for independence from PNG by the peoples of other PNG provinces.
The same cannot be said for Bougainville. Independence is not a new concept for Bougainvilleans; it has pervaded the archipelago’s persona for over a century. Passed around between colonial powers eager to harvest its resources, Bougainvilleans were first told they “belonged” to Germany, then after World War I to Australia pursuant to a United Nations mandate, then subjugated by Japan, and at the end of World War II found themselves again part of Australia and incorporated into the Territory of PNG.
When it was announced in 1970 that PNG—including Bougainville—would become the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, Bougainvilleans felt nonplussed; they had not been consulted in a meaningful way.
While both PNG and Bougainville are Melanesian cultures, there are significant differences between them.
Also, Bougainville may be a political unit of PNG, but geographically it is part of the Solomon Islands. In the 1970s, the Solomon Islands were also gaining their independence. In the minds of many Bougainvilleans, it seemed as good a time as any to strike out on their own. In 1975, as the deadline of the PNG independence deal loomed, a team of Bougainvilleans flew to New York City to petition the United Nations for their freedom.
One wonders about the irritation the players managing the South Pacific chessboard at the time—Australia, Great Britain, and the United Nations, no doubt, with the not-yet-prodigal United States a shadow observer in the background—felt about the futile thrashings of the Bougainvillean parvenus.
In any event, independence was not to be. The UN sent them home unfulfilled. But the flame had been lit. It smoldered for decades, and now burns bright.
Q: How are relations with China/Australia/US?
A: Watching Australia spend hundreds of millions more on PNG than when it was a territory (on things that one can’t see like medicine and schoolbooks), one is struck by the uncomfortable sense that PNG expects nothing less.
Meanwhile, China is investing large amounts as well, but its cash is being spent on attention-getting infrastructure. China rebuilt a significant portion of downtown Port Moresby, PNG’s capital city, for APEC 2018, where Xi Jinping was the keynote speaker (a first for a Chinese leader). It has also rebuilt the main highway from the airport to Lae, PNG’s largest industrial city, and is now busy constructing a brand-new airport terminal there.
On the other hand, China has, so far, not been able to gain a foothold in Bougainville. That result has not been for lack of trying. However, Bougainville’s Constitution is a strong impediment. It says that the land and all of its resources belong to Bougainville’s individual landowners, not the government. Paying off venal government officials doesn’t get foreigners very far.
For the past few decades, the United States has beaten a gradual retreat from the South Pacific. Given the aggressive manoeuvres of China in the region, that path must obviously be reversed.
Q: What role is Indonesia playing?
A: Indonesia could only play a role in mainland PNG if PNG continues to flounder. And flounder it has. Recently, the government has been evicted from many of its offices in Port Moresby due to years of non-payment of back rent.
PNG Power, the government-owned electric utility, is functionally insolvent. Due to anecdotal evidence like this, there is always speculation about the collapse of PNG and the potential of Indonesia sidling in from the western half of New Guinea.
However, the same issues that make it difficult for the PNG government to manage problems across its fractious nation should surely dissuade a foreign power with a wholly different culture from invading.
Q: How could India contribute to security, stability and prosperity?
A: Certainly, Bougainville needs the normal items that one sees aid organizations contribute: medicine; school books; and computers.
While much needed and welcome, those items will not have enough impact in a place that must lever its entire economy upward quickly to join the twenty-first century. To do so, Bougainville needs major economic development, the kind only industrial nations with skilled infrastructure industries—like India—can provide.
Bougainville has the resources to be harnessed. If India, like Bougainville a democracy, could provide the capital, technology, and training to harness these resources, Bougainville could, with the assistance of a compatible partner, easily become a South Pacific outlier.