Introduction

Although it was already 10 am, few people were around in the government offices. There was just one beaten-up car in the car park, its door adorned with a sticker bearing the emblem of the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG), which features a bulbous headdress called an upe, worn by teenage boys during initiation ceremonies in parts of Bougainville. It was my first day in the office. Turning the key, I entered a darkened room, only to be struck by cold as dank and fierce as a sepulchre, thanks to the air conditioner left running full blast for three months – except, that is, for the regular intervals of power outages.

The room looked and smelled like the office of a university don who rarely opened the windows. A few spines of books poked out here and there, but it was the hundreds of orange and yellow manila folders stuffed with papers that commanded my attention. This motley assortment was the handiwork of my predecessor and her predecessor and his predecessor before that, running all the way back to 2005, when this government was established. These uncatalogued papers represented their heritage. Curious, I leafed through them; there were minutes from internal meetings, records of committees, and patchy details referring to working groups and ‘technical teams’ formed between the Bougainville government and Papua New Guinea (PNG). What a neat phrase is ‘technical teams’, I thought to myself. It conjured up images of furrowed bureaucrats plunging heads down into official records and wrangling over subclauses.

The notes recorded many beginnings but fewer ends; many of the endeavours had petered out after merely a gathering or two. Another feature of the archive was its countless drafts of documents marked ‘policy’ that aspired to regulate every conceivable governmental endeavour. The documents evoked ardent faith that government could do anything. There was a natural disasters policy in a place where there was no fire brigade, and a hydropower policy for a place in which electricity was intermittent and the grunt-grunt of the diesel generator permeated daily life. Prominent, too, were weighty and sizeable documents bearing important titles such as ‘Cocoa value chain study’ and ‘Coconut husking productivity interim assessment’. Each such document – all paid for by international aid donors – exceeded 250 pages in length, leading me to wonder who would ever have read them. Amid these annals I found a copy of the Egyptian Educational Development Plan 2007–12, bearing the beaming visage of the then president, Hosni Mubarak, and a copy of the national security policy of Jamaica of similar vintage. Inserted within that document was a thin government newsletter from many Christmases ago, talking up projects thought to be about to finish but that years later remained uncompleted.

On top of one flamingo-coloured folder was a bound copy of a Master’s thesis¹ written 10 years previously by a man called Raymond Masono. I knew Raymond’s name but had yet to meet him. At the time, he was a Master’s student at The Australian National University; now, he was one of 14 ministers in the Bougainville government with whom I was to work. In the year after my arrival, he would be appointed vice-president. His thesis, completed long before he joined the government, was written in the style of a man eager to get something off his chest. The abstract read thus:

While expectations are understandably high, the ABG’s ability to meet citizen expectations is being hampered by the government’s administrative, institutional and financial capacities, the security situation on the island and a very weak economy. The success or failure of political autonomy, and indeed this post-conflict governance structure, will depend to a large extent on the type of policies that the government designs and implements, as well as its interactions with citizens.²

I sat at my desk, hemmed in by this palisade of files, cowed by the efforts of those who had come before me. The air in the room began to feel asphyxiating. I looked up at the walls and saw a solitary poster, its headline proclaiming an ‘awareness strategy’ and detailing the ‘road to the referendum’. As part of the 2001 Bougainville Peace Agreement (the Peace Agreement)³ that ended the war, Bougainvilleans were granted the right to vote by mid-2020 about their future political status: whether to be independent or remain part of PNG. With the referendum three to four years away, this sleepy office might one day be part of the engine room of the world’s newest country. What did everyone do here? I wondered, as I looked around, not knowing where to begin. What did my predecessors leave behind, apart from these files? And what exactly was I doing here? At that point the room plunged into darkness; the power had cut out again.

* * *

This is a book of travel accounts, histories, vignettes and recollections from four years spent on and off in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, a place that could, potentially, become the newest country in the world. The period spans the time from my arrival in 2016 to the end of 2019, when Bougainvilleans voted in overwhelming numbers – 97.7 per cent of votes cast – in favour of independence. The manuscript was completed in early 2022, when, notwithstanding the vote’s outcome, no flag of an independent Bougainville had yet been raised. Fitful negotiations to give effect to the result have taken place; Bougainville remains an autonomous region of PNG.⁴ COVID-19 is an important factor, but it is not the sole one. The difficulty of getting two small and weak bureaucracies – Bougainville and PNG – to knuckle down and develop the administrative nuts and bolts required to give effect to the result is a far weightier factor requiring consideration. Energy levels in both governments pulsate at the drowsy levels they did that humid day when I turned the key to my office door for the first time. It’s by no means an exact parallel, but in the four years I worked in Bougainville, leaders in the United Kingdom and the European Union were negotiating the hurdles of Brexit, each with battalions of bureaucrats beavering away in the background. No such battalions do service in this land beyond the Coral Sea, and given that the text of the Brexit withdrawal agreement runs to more than 2,000 pages, the challenge of developing a similar divorce seems insuperable. Another reason for the lack of progress is naked global politics. There are no nation-states in the world that want Bougainville to join their club.

This is in part a scholarly book, in the sense that it carries footnotes and is the product of research. But it also a subjective book, grounded in my own experience, my own mindset and my particular way of seeing the world. It is shaped by a Northern Irish childhood and a career that has toggled between researching and working in parts of the world that once gained headlines for conflict. Others I have worked with would write a much different book about this time, as would Bougainvilleans. I acknowledge that some with an interest in this topic may disagree or have a different interpretation from mine. In 20–25 years, when the cables that diplomats of this time sent back to their capitals are publicly released, we will be able to gain additional insights wrought from the diplomatic frontline, and compare and contrast these with press releases and tweets published at the time. For now, however, this chronicle emerges from my observations and experience, which I hope will shed light on one person’s involvement with a time of transition in a place I hold close to my heart and want dearly to see succeed.

Bougainville is a story that reaches beyond this pattern of islands in the Solomon Sea and delves into questions of what is required to become a new addition to the modern map.⁵ Bougainville is not the only region seeking to become a country. On the shelf beside my desk as I write sits An Atlas of Countries That Don’t Exist, which is a book of maps detailing the many regions of the world whose populations are seeking to strike out as independent nations.⁶ Among these peoples are the Kurds, the Sahrawis, the people of the English-speaking regions of Cameroon, Tibetans, Assamese, the Moro in the Philippines, Catalans and, closest to Bougainville itself, the Indigenous people of West Papua, which was swallowed by Indonesia in the 1960s.⁷ The membership of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization encompasses more than 50 places and comprises more than 300 million people. By virtue of my Irish Catholicism and many happy years spent living in Timor-Leste, the first new nation of the 21st century, to this day I am drawn instinctively to the romance of nationalist causes and separatism, what the Irish republican leader Ernie O’Malley called ‘the singing flame’ of independence.⁸ Bougainville, however, taught me just how difficult it is to run a government and to source the skills required to do so properly. Fancy titles such as ‘technical teams’ may make for a spectacle of administration, but they achieve little else.

Engaging with Bougainville and places like it is a challenge for the fluid concept that is ‘the international community’.⁹ For decades, scholars and researchers have been wrestling with the question of how to effectively support societies emerging from conflict¹⁰ and in places where the reach of government does not extend much beyond the door of the office. A large cottage industry of think tanks and academics is working on the topic. It is impossible to keep up; the paper produced daily could match the amount I found amassed in my Bougainville office. Yet, just as in Timor-Leste, I found there is a major gap between, on the one hand, strategy and thought on paper, and on the other, real-world policy in action, in part because many of the people who do the writing do not do the work of implementation.

A feature of many such places is that efforts are made to build effective administrations in places with no previous history of them. Writing specifically about peace agreements (although their findings have broader application), Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart find a general lack of focus in the literature about who is to do the work.¹¹ They write that a ‘leitmotif running through [peace agreements] is the need for a state apparatus that is professionally staffed, capable, honest, and infused with the value of public service’, but that little attention is paid to how to attain that goal.¹²

Few places emerging from conflict have a public service able to correspond to such a functioning image, something that Ashraf Ghani in particular knows only too well. He was president of Afghanistan from 2014 to 2021 before fleeing the Taliban’s march on Kabul. His doomed efforts when in the top job illustrate the gulf between opining about how things should be done and actually doing something about them.

Moreover, this academic or policy-oriented style of writing – sober, deliberative, logical, solution-oriented – is not a natural fit for many of the challenges I found in Bougainville, or indeed anywhere. One crucial challenge is that in many ways the implementation of the prescribed activity is an innately human endeavour, one marked by human foibles. Yet, the role of individuals – the good, the bad; the hard-working, the shirking; the committed, the crack-brained – is missing entirely from the writing about it, in defiance of reality. In Bougainville, as everywhere, individuals are intensely visible to one another, their strengths, quirks and idiosyncrasies gabbed about at length. In not writing about them, we show cognitive dissonance about the importance of human agency.

It’s not just Bougainville. While the project I worked on was funded by Australian aid, the challenges I encountered are the same no matter who is stumping up. The cookbook for such places is filled with familiar recipes irrespective of location: the deployment of technical advisers to support nascent governments, grants to boost agriculture and stimulate the economy, money to build roads, support for rural areas, and support for broad goals like ‘governance’, ‘justice’ and ‘public administration’. There is an obsession with not deviating from the ingredients list; many aid projects are characterised by long-range and weighty plans developed years in advance. Forceful emphasis is placed upon reporting that every recipe has resulted in the production of a triumphant dish; for example, researchers found that 96 per cent of Australia’s official words about its own aid program are positive.¹³ Few people working at the coalface believe in the veracity of this figure, yet the seeming reluctance to publicly acknowledge harder truths about the difficulty of this line of work is pervasive.

Typing the last paragraph triggered a memory, of a beachfront banquet in Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste, held one sultry, windless night many years ago, at a time when the most recent Nokia phone was still the status symbol. The dinner was held in honour of a visiting Australian minister, there on a flying visit. The minister looked bored by the stilted chatter. When it was suggested everyone switch seats after dinner to enliven the deadening atmosphere, I was just heading off to the bathroom, and I returned to find the minister sitting alone. Having nowhere else to go, I plonked myself down next to him. We had a great chat. We spoke about this and that – our shared love of cricket, his Irish heritage, the liminal delights of high-status Qantas lounges, a tip on public speaking that I use to this day (grip a pen tightly). Then he turned to me and said: ‘Can you tell me if this project is working well, because I don’t believe all these long reports I’m being given. They read like boring fairy stories.’ Thereupon, the minister’s staffers decided it was high time the meeting concluded.

I believe it is fundamental that we tell more than a boring fairy story; instead, we need to hear a more adult, less utopian, more dappled tale. Although scribes abound within the fields of post-conflict reconstruction and aid, individuals with most of the accumulated knowledge about the ironies, absurdities, contradictions and Sisyphean challenges of such work rarely describe their experiences, whether in books, academic tomes or, indeed, anywhere else. That’s understandable. This is a precarious and uncertain line of work; when I worked as a consultant I didn’t get paid for these assignments until the product – invariably a report – was accepted, a remuneration arrangement that always concentrated the mind. We need to acknowledge that this is difficult work, and the unalloyed success of activities aimed at assisting in transitions to statehood is the exception rather than the norm.¹⁴ In this book, I touch on the good work that aid is achieving in complicated and difficult settings. If there is a moral and a wider application to my tale, it is to be found in an appeal for humility, and for more realistic thinking about the possibilities and inherent limitations of such assistance, with less of a focus on convincing people that everything is tickety-boo.

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