March 20, 2025, 8:09 am | Read time: 3 minutes
In 2027, the world could welcome a new country. The inhabitants of Bougainville voted for their independence back in 2019. Now, the island in the South Pacific could actually become an independent state.
Almost 98% of the inhabitants of Bougainville want independence from Papua New Guinea. They already voted for this in a referendum in 2019. A forum of Bougainville leaders is now recommending September 2027 as the date for the autonomous region’s independence from Papua New Guinea, writes the public broadcaster Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). This means that Bougainville could become the youngest state in the world in just two and a half years.
Overview
Independence Talks between Bougainville and Papua New Guinea
The year 2027 has been under discussion for a while now. According to ABC, Bougainville and Papua New Guinea agreed on this date as early as 2022, after the inhabitants of the possible future new island state had already voted by a large majority in favor of independence three years earlier. However, Papua New Guinea’s parliament must ratify the result of the non-binding referendum.
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.
The End of the Bloody Fighting?
If the autonomous province of Bougainville is indeed declared an independent state in the near future, this will mean the end of decades of fighting. This has been going on since the 1960s and has been bloody at times. 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 in Bougainville on the one hand and the security apparatus of Papua New Guinea and foreign mercenaries on the other”. More than 15,000 people had been killed and many displaced in the decade-long conflict.
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Poor Despite Numerous Natural Resources
Bougainville is located east of Papua New Guinea and northeast of Australia, spanning an area of just under 9,000 square kilometers. 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 belonged to German New Guinea between the 1880s and the First World War, Australia occupied the territory. It 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 extraction of raw materials.