"Could Bougainville be the world’s newest nation?"

Twenty years in waiting, decades more in the making, and steeped in blood, 200,000 Bougainvilleans will cast their ballots over the next fortnight in a non-binding referendum, setting the island on the border of PNG and Solomon Islands on the path to nationhood.

رأی‌دهندگان در حال نشان دادن پرچم و نشان خودمختاری بوگن‌ویل Source: SBS News

Australia could soon have a new neighbouring country, in the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea as the region goes to the polls to vote on independence.

The referendum will run over two weeks and is a key part of a 2001 peace agreement that ended a brutal civil war in which at least 15,000 people died in the cluster of islands to the east of the Papua New Guinea mainland.

Read the full story in English here.