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Bougainville is just to the north of Australia, at the far western tip of the Solomon Islands archipelago. It is a tropical, mountainous island and is geographically and ethnically part of the Solomon Islands.
However, a century ago, European colonial powers made Bougainville part of Papua New Guinea (PNG), despite the fact that Bougainville is about 300 miles away from the mainland of Papua New Guinea.
Bougainville is a village-based society economically based on gardening and fishing. Surprisingly, much of the land is owned by women and inherited through the female line.
In 1988, Francis Ona, the son of a dispossessed village chief, formed the Panguna Landowners Association (soon to be known as the Bougainville Revolutionary Army) to protest both land issues and a foreign mining company’s control of the island; Ona and his followers shut down the mine on Dec. 1, 1988, using explosives.
In April 1990, the PNG government, with the assistance of the Australian government, imposed a blockade of the island in an attempt to reopen the mine, and to prevent Ona and the BRA from acquiring arms. It is this period that Jones chronicles in Mr. Pip. Primarily, it was women and children who were most affected by the blockade because of a lack of medical aid and food.
The blockade of Bougainville — which supposedly ended during a 1994 ceasefire, but nevertheless continued informally until 1997 — was directly responsible for the loss of about 10 percent of the population, sources estimate.
In the late 1990s, the United Nations became involved in promoting peace negotiations between Bougainville and Papua New Guinea. After protracted discussions, a peace treaty was formally signed and autonomy eventually awarded to the island. The United Nations still retains an observing team on the island which, in part, monitors weapons disposal.
