New Country Dropping Soon

 As part of my attempts to spend my free time less on social media, and as an attempt to consolidate my dedication to words, I’ve subscribed to a couple magazines, namely Harper’s and Jacobin. My first issue of Harper’s came in last week, and having read most of it, I wanted to summarize the most exciting thing I learned as a result. There’s going to be a new country soon, probably in the next 2 years or so: Bougainville.

The article I read was The Island King by Sean Williams, and while I loved reading about his journey to meet the self-proclaimed king of Bougainville, I most enjoyed just learning about this island’s existence. So this blog will basically be a walkthrough of my Wikipedia binge on the topic.

Bougainville is a small set of islands that are currently part of Papua New Guinea, a nation well known for its diversity of languages (at least 840 recognized ones). It’s basically one of the most “indigenous” nations in the world, where many people live in a rural, tribal manner. Bougainville is in the part of Oceania known as Melanesia, thus named for the dark skin color of its natives, due to high amounts of the pigment melanin. There are an estimated 300 thousand residents of the island. It has the fuckass name of Bougainville for predictable reasons, it’s named after some French guy who wasn’t even the first European to get there. I guess it’s slightly better than the nearby islands of New Ireland and New Britain.

OK, so why is this island going to secede from Papua New Guinea? The answer is refreshingly easy to understand. Unfortunately for the Bougainvilleans, white people found ore on their island. A lot of it. The Panguna mine, set up by Australian company Rio Tinto, was at the time the largest gold and copper mine in the entire world. This single mine made up 12% of Papua New Guinea’s GDP. The people of Bougainville received almost none of this money, and instead received a huge amount of toxic mining tailings in their rivers. If you look at the island using Google Maps satellite view (which I highly recommend as a supplement to your reading here), you can see a nasty scar running through the lush forests, matched in desolation only by the island’s active volcanoes. Not only that, but the operators of this mine were largely Australians and New Guineans that were not native to the island. So when a bunch of people who aren’t from your island come over and poison and steal from you, what is there to do but start a revolution?

The Bougainville Civil War, which started in 1988, lasted a decade. It is considered the worst conflict in Oceania since big ol WWII, and thousands died as a result. It was eventually successful, however, and the mine has not been in operation since 1989. Given that it’s war, there was a blockade and the people of Bougainville had to re-learn their traditional ways of living with only the island’s resources. They actually found some pretty ingenious ways to use coconuts, such as making them into a potent biofuel. Bougainville eventually voted 98% in favor to secede from Papua New Guinea in 2019, and is expected to gain independence in 2027. According to the Williams article though, it will cost an estimated $250 million per year to operate a functional government, and the only place that Bougainville will get the money from that is from the Panguna mine. Hopefully with indigenous operation, they can live peacefully and healthily with that.