Bougainville Takes The Initiative In Independence Mediation

Don
Wiseman, RNZ Pacific Senior Journalist

In
recent weeks, Bougainville has taken the initiative, boldly
stating that it expects to be independent by 1 September
2027.

It also expects the PNG parliament to quickly
ratify the 2019 referendum, in which an overwhelming
majority of Bougainvilleans supported independence.

In
a third move, it established a Constitution Commission and
included it within the region’s autonomous
parliament.

To learn more, RNZ Pacific spoke with
Australian National University academic Thiago Oppermann,
who has spent many years in both Bougainville and
PNG.

(The transcript has been edited for brevity
and clarity.)

Don Wiseman: We’ve had
five-and-a-half years since the Bougainville referendum, but
very suddenly in the last couple of months, it would seem
that Bougainville is picking up pace and trying to really
make some progress with this march towards independence, as
they see it. Are they overplaying their
hand?

Thiago Oppermann: I do
not believe that they are overplaying their hand. I think
that the impression that is apparent of a sudden flurry of
activity, arises partly because for the first two years
after the referendum, there was a very slow pace.

One
of the shortcomings of the Bougainville Peace Agreement
(BPA) was that it did not set out a very clear
post-referendum path. That part of the process was not as
well designed as the parts leading to the referendum, and
that left a great deal of uncertainty as to how to structure
negotiations, how things should be conducted, and quite
substantial differences in the views of the Papua New
Guinean government and the ABG (Autonomous Bougainville
Government), as to how the referendum result would be
processed further.

For instance, how it would it need
to be tabled in parliament, what kind of vote would be
required for it, would a negotiation between the parties
lead to an agreement that then is presented to the
parliament, and how would that negotiation work? All these
areas, they were not prescriptive, in the BPA.

That
led to a period of a good two years in which there was very
slow process and then attempts to get some some movement. I
would say that in that period, the views of the
Bougainvilleans and the Papua New Guineans became quite
entrenched in quite different camps, and something I think
would have to give eventually.

Why the Bougainvilleans
have moved towards this point now, I think that it bears
pointing out that there has been a long process that has
been unfolding, for more than two years now, of beginning
the organic process of developing a Bougainvillean
constitutional process with this constitutional development
committees across the island doing a lot of work, and that
has now borne fruit, is how I would describe it.

It
happens at a point where the process has been unblocked by
the appointment of Sir Jerry Mataparae, which I think sets a
new vigour into the process. It looks now like it’s heading
towards some form of outcome. And that being the case, the
Bougainvilleans have made their position quite
clear.

DW: Well, Bougainville, in fact, is
saying it will be independent by 1st September 2027. How
likely do you think that
is?

TO: I think there’s a
question that comes before that. When Bougainville says that
they will be independent by such a date, what we need to
first consider is that the process of mediation is still
unfolding.

I think that the first thing to consider
is, what would that independence look like, and what scope
is there within the mediation for finding some compromise
that still suits Papua New Guinea. I think that there’s a
much greater range of outcomes than people realise within
this sort of umbrella of independence, the Bougainvilleans
themselves, have moved to a position of understanding
independence in much more nuanced terms than
previously.

You might imagine that in the aftermath of
this fairly brutal and bitter civil conflict, the idea of
independence at that time was quite a radical cut towards
‘full bruk loose’ as they say.

But the reality is that
for many post colonial and new states since World War Two,
there are many different kinds of independence and the
degree to which there remains a kind of attachment with or
relationship with the so called parent colonial country is
variable, I should add.

I do not want to digress too
much, but this concept of the parent colonial country is
something that I heard quite a lot of when I was studying
the referendum itself. Many people would say that the
relationship that they had to Papua New Guinea was not one
of enmity or of like running away, it was more a question of
there being a parent and Bougainville having now grown up to
the point where the child, Bougainville, is ready to go off
and set up its own house.

Many people thought of it in
those terms. Now I think that in concrete terms that can be
articulated in many different ways when we think about
international law and the status of different sovereign
nations around the world.

DW: If we can just
look at some of the possibilities in terms of the way in
which this independence might be interpreted. My
understanding is, for Bougainville it’s vital that they have
a degree of sovereignty that will allow them to join
organisations like the United Nations, but they’re not
necessarily looking to be fully independent of
PNG.

TO: Yes, I think that
there would be like a process underway in Bougainville for
understanding what that would look like.

There are
certainly people who would have a view that is still more
firmly towards full independence. And there will be others
who understand some type of free association arrangements or
something that still retains a closer relationship with
Papua New Guinea.

I do not think many people have
illusions that Bougainville could, for instance, suddenly
break loose of the very deep economic connections it has
with Papua New Guinea, not only those of government funding,
but the commercial connections which are very, very deep. So
suddenly making that disappear is not something people
believe it’s possible.

But there are many other
options that are on the table. I think what Bougainville is
doing by having the announcement of the Independence Day is
setting for Papua New Guinea saying, like, ‘here is the
terms of the debate that we are prepared to consider’. But
within that there is still a great deal of giving and
taking.

DW: Now within the parliament in PNG,
I think Bougainville has felt for some time that there
hasn’t been a great deal of understanding of what
Bougainville has been through, or what it is Bougainville is
trying to achieve. There’s a very different lineup of MPs to
what they were at the turn of the century when the
Bougainville Peace Agreement was finalised. So what are they
thinking, the MPs from other parts of the country? Are they
going to be supportive, or are they just thinking about the
impact on their own
patch?

TO: I am not entirely
sure what the MPs think, and they are a very diverse bunch
of people. The sort of concern I think that many have,
certainly more senior ones, that they do not want to be the
people in charge when this large chunk of the country
secedes.

I think that is something that is important,
and we do not want to be patronising the Papua New Guineans
have a great deal of national pride, and it is not an event
of celebration to see what is going on.

For many, it
is quite a tragic chain of events. I am not entirely sure
what the bulk of MPs believes about this. We have conducted
some research, which is non randomised, but it is quite
large scale, probing attitudes towards Bougainvillean
independence in 2022, around the time of the
election.

What we found, which is quite surprising, is
that whilst of course, Bougainville has the highest support
for independence of any place in Papua New Guinea, there are
substantial numbers of people outside Bougainville that are
sympathetic to Bougainvillean independence or sympathetic
towards implementing the referendum.

I think that
would be the wording, I would choose, quite large numbers of
people. So, as well as, many people who are very much
undecided on the issues. From a Papua New Guinean
perspective, the views are much more subtle than you might
think are the case. By comparison, if you did a survey in
Madrid of how many people support Catalan independence, you
would not see figures similar to the ones that we find for
Papua New Guinea.

DW: Bougainville is due to
go to elections later this year. The ABG has stated that it
wants this matter sorted, I think, at the time that the
election writs are issued sometime in June. Will it be able
to do this do you think?

TO:
It’s always difficult to predict anything,
especially the future. That goes double in Papua New Guinea
and Bougainville. I think the reality is that the nature of
negotiations here and in Bougainville, there’s a great deal
of personal connections and toing and froing that will be
taking place.

It is very hard to fit that onto a clear
timeline. I would describe that as perhaps aspirational, but
it would be, it would be good. Whether this is, you know, a
question of electoral politics within Bougainville, I think
there would be, like, a more or less unanimous view in
Bougainville that this needs to move forward as soon as
possible. But I don’t know that a timeline is
realistic.

The concerns that I would have about this,
Don, would be not just about sort of questions of capacity
and what happens in the negotiations in Bougainville, but we
also need to think about what is happening in Papua New
Guinea, and this goes for the entire process.

But
here, in this case, PNG has its hands full with many other
issues as well. There is a set of like LLG [Local Level
Government] elections about to happen, so there are a great
deal of things for the government to attend to. I wonder how
viable it is to come up with a solution in a short time, but
they are certainly capable of surprising
everybody.

DW: The Prime Minister, James
Marape, has said on a number of occasions that Bougainville
is not economically ready or it hasn’t got the security
situation under control. And my understanding is that when
this was raised at the last meeting, there was quite a lot
of giggling going on, because people were comparing what’s
happened in Bougainville with what’s happening around the
rest of the country, including in Southern Highlanbds, the
province of Mr Marape.

TO: I
think you know for me when I think about this, because I
have worked with Bougainvilleans for a long time, and have
worked with Papua New Guineans for a long time as well. The
sense that I have is really one of quite sadness and a great
missed opportunity.

Because if we wind the clock back
to 1975, Bougainville declared independence, trying to
pre-empt [the establishment of] Papua New Guinea. And that
set in train a set of events that drastically reformed the
Papua New Guinean Political Constitution. Many of the sort
of characteristic institutions we see now in Papua New
Guinea, such as provinces, came about partly because of
that.

That crisis, that first independence crisis, the
first secession crisis, was resolved through deep changes to
Papua New Guinea and to Bougainville, in which the country
was able to grow and move forward.

What we see now,
though, is this sort of view that Bougainville problems must
all be solved in Bougainville, but in fact, many of the
problems that are said to be Bougainville problems are Papua
New Guinea problems, and that would include issues such as
the economic difficulties that Bougainville finds itself
in.

I mean, there are many ironies with this kind of
criticism that Bougainville is not economically viable. One
of them being that when Papua New Guinea became independent,
it was largely dependent on Bougainville at that time. So
Bougainvilleans are aware of this, and don’t really welcome
that kind of idea.

But I think that more deeply there
were some really important lessons I believe that could have
been learned from the peace process that might have been
very useful in other areas of Papua New Guinea, and because
Bougainville has been kind of seen as this place apart,
virtually as a foreign nation, those lessons have not,
unfortunately, filtered back to Papua New Guinea in a way
that might have been very helpful for
everybody.

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