Most of the recent news coming out of Papua New Guinea is about the refugee crisis on Manus Island, where hundreds of predominantly Middle Eastern asylum seekers intercepted in Australian waters have languished in legal limbo for five long years. But 1,000 kilometres southeast of Manus, on Bougainville Island, a story with far wider-reaching geopolitical and economic implications for the bloody 40-year-long independence struggle of a quarter of a million people is approaching an endgame.
Cut from a glossy travel brochure and just smaller than Hawaii’s Big Island, Bougainville is blessed with incredible natural resources: warm waters teeming with fish, hyper-fertile soil and one of the largest untapped mineral deposits on the planet.
