Australia’s Bougainville Beef

After meeting with Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape in Port Moresby in mid-October, Australia’s deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, created an unintentional storm over Bougainville’s path toward independence. Marles made a seemingly innocuous comment that Australia would support PNG’s decision on the province’s status. Bougainville voted to leave PNG in 2019, but the PNG parliament needs to ratify the move to make it official.

Marles’s comment was interpreted by Boungainville President Ishmael Toroama as support for PNG denying independence – a decision the parliament has yet to make. Toroama claimed that Canberra was throwing its weight behind Port Moresby in an attempt to destabilize Bougainville and deny it its right to self-determination. He said that Marles was making “veiled threats” against the people of Bougainville.

Toroama’s outburst prompted Marles to issue a clarifying statement that Australia will support whatever agreement is reached between Bougainville and PNG, and that it is not Canberra’s role to articulate any views on the matter.

This is, of course, Australia’s official position. Yet it is obviously also an issue that is of great concern to Australia. The Melanesian region is one with a number of fault lines that will become Australia’s responsibility should violence return. The Bougainville Civil War raged for a decade between 1988 and 1998, killing around 20,000 people, which was around 10 percent of the population at the time. Following this, serious ethnic violence broke out in neighboring Solomon Islands, which led to the Australia-led Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) that provided security in the country from 2003 to 2017.

At present, Bougainville has considerable autonomy within PNG as part of the peace agreement reached after the civil war. Part of the agreement included the referendum on independence held in 2019. On this issue, Bougainville itself is not divided. The public voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence with 98 percent “yes” votes with a turnout of 87 percent. This is a massive public mandate that Port Moresby cannot ignore.

Yet for PNG the calculations aren’t so simple. No country is happy to give up territory, and for a developing country the loss of significant resources is also difficult to accept. It is estimated that the Bougainville’s currently dormant Panguna mine retains around $58 billion worth of copper and gold, a significant percentage of which the PNG would hope to secure in royalties. Even though conflict over the mine’s royalties was the spark that lit PNG’s civil war, the temptation to restart operations remains great in a country desperate for cash.

But for PNG the prospect of losing one of its provinces also has wider implications for the integrity of the rest of the country. There is the potential that other regions of the country that have their own designs on greater autonomy will be emboldened by Bougainville’s independence. In mid-2018 the PNG government of Peter O’Neill created an agreement with the governors of New Ireland, East New Britain, and Enga that would begin the process of devolving powers to these provinces. But as we’ve seen in places like Scotland, decentralization can ignite greater demands for independence, rather than placating them.

Given that China has inserted itself into the region’s security arrangements with its recent agreement with Solomon Islands – and with Bougainville geographically part of the Solomon Islands archipelago – the picture looks concerning to Canberra. An independent Bougainville would immediately become an aid-dependent nation. Although the autonomy Bougainville was granted by the peace agreement has enabled the government to develop some of the required infrastructure to transition toward sovereignty, at present Bougainville’s government derives only 14 percent of its budget from internal revenue generation.

As Beijing is actively forging closer relations with the global south and with Bougainville’s strategic location as an entry point from the western Pacific into the Coral Sea, its independence will likely attract considerable attention. China would also be keen to make sure that Bougainville immediately recognizes Beijing and not Taipei. Given there is strong support for Taiwan within the Pacific, China will be highly motivated to invest considerable resources.

The timeline for Bougainville’s independence is 2027. An agreement has been reached to move toward this, but the deal still needs to be ratified by PNG’s parliament. Alongside the central government’s concerns, many of PNG’s regions will also have self-interested reasons for opposing independence, or at least using it as leverage for their own objectives. The saying “all politics is local” is true in the extreme in PNG.

For Toroama to react the way he did to Marles’ comments may indicate that he has the feeling that at present ratification may not be a foregone conclusion. If he believes that Australian neutrality may not be enough to achieve independence, Toroama may instead be seeking some pressure from Canberra on the PNG parliament. This is pressure that it unlikely to materialize.