Referendum to decide B’ville future

OVER the next few weeks, the people of PNG are certainly going to wait with tense anticipation as the Bougainville referendum draws to a conclusion.
What is going to be the final outcome? We are hoping against all hope that the people of Bougainville will have the clarity of mind to vote against independence.
Prime Minister James Marape has been saying “political independence is meaningless without economic independence”.
Marape’s words promote the views shared by many world governments that are advocating about political integration and economic advancement.
Governments around the world are not talking about splitting up countries into smaller, impoverished states. In countries where divergent ethnic and cultural views abound, governments are looking at ways to correct political aberrations as well as economic inequalities that can bring about the disintegration of a country.
Our collective history goes back a long way.
During the years leading up to Papua New Guinea’s independence in 1975 and thereafter, the giant Panguna Copper mine contributed significantly to the development of PNG.
Until 1989, Bougainville Copper Ltd at Panguna was one of the largest copper mines in the Southern hemisphere.
During the Bougainville crisis, significant mine infrastructures were destroyed.
Francis Ona and his Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) used explosives to blow up power pylons at Panguna around December 1988. The explosives used by the BRA in the particular act of sabotage, were actually stolen from within the premises of the mine. Going down memory lane, the year 1989 can be remembered with bittersweet memories.
A piece of our collective history that is replete with memories of tearful farewells and hasty departures out of the airport and seaport of Arawa, Kieta and elsewhere in Bougainville during the height of the Bougainville crisis.
The exodus of ‘redskins’ out of Bougainville during the formative years of the secessionist war is a piece of our collective history that can never be forgotten.
The Bougainvilleans were taking up arms at that time not because they hated the ‘redskins’ but because they wanted to reassert control of their own economic and political destiny.
According to a Bougainvillean writer, outsiders were becoming the new occupiers of Bougainville while the original landowners were pushed further toward the margins of poverty and economic disenchantment.
The referendum which is underway in Bougainville is a democratically acceptable means by which a political end can be found.

Paul Waugla Wii,
Wandi, Simbu