March 20, 2025, 10:37 a.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
In 2027 the world could welcome a new country. The residents of Bougainville voted for independence back in 2019. Now the island in the South Pacific could actually become an independent state.
Almost 98 percent of Bougainville residents want independence from Papua New Guinea. They voted for this in a referendum in 2019. A forum of Bougainville leaders is now recommending September 2027 as the date for independence for the autonomous region of Papua New Guinea, writes the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). This means that Bougainville could become the youngest state in the world in just two and a half years.
Independence talks between Bougainville and Papua New Guinea
The end of the bloody fighting?
Poor despite numerous mineral resources
Independence talks between Bougainville and Papua New Guinea
The year 2027 has already been discussed for a while, and according to ABC, Bougainville and Papua New Guinea agreed on this date in 2022 after the residents of the possibly future new island state had already voted for their independence with a large majority three years earlier. However, the result of the non-binding referendum must be ratified by Papua New Guinea's parliament.
The forum's new resolution was signed by Bougainville's President Ishmael Toroama and regional MPs, writes ABC. It comes ahead of the independence talks between Bougainville and Papua New Guinea.
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The end of the bloody fighting?
If the autonomous province of Bougainville is actually declared an independent state in the near future, it will mean the end of decades of fighting. These have been going on since the 1960s and were sometimes bloody. As Deutsche Welle (DW) wrote in a 2019 article, the independence referendum had already been "promised in 2001 as part of a peace agreement that ended a conflict between rebels on Bougainville on the one hand and Papua New Guinea's security apparatus and foreign mercenaries on the other." By then, more than 15,000 people had been killed and many displaced in the decade-long conflict.
Poor despite numerous mineral resources
Bougainville is located east of Papua New Guinea and northeast of Australia and is just under 9,000 square meters in size. Around 249,358 people live here. In addition to the main island of Bougainville, the area includes the island of Buka and other smaller island groups. After Bougainville was part of German New Guinea between the 1880s and the First World War, Australia occupied the territory. Bougainville has been part of Papua New Guinea since 1975. According to “DW”, the population is very poor despite large deposits of gold and copper and the island suffers from environmental problems due to the mining of raw materials.
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