Bougainville government called on to find missing people

The chair of the Bougainville Families of the Missing Person's Association says the region's government needs to do more to find hundreds of people who disappeared during the civil war.

Nearly 20 years since the conflict in the autonomous Papua New Guinea region ended, the number of people who went missing remains unknown, but the Red Cross believes it could be in the hundreds.

This weekend, the association led a march through the towns of Buka and Arawa calling for more to be done to find out what happened, and to repatriate the remains to their home villages.

Its chair, Peter Garuai, whose brother Benedict went missing in 1993, says the government needs to do something ahead of a referendum on possible independence.

"Within the cultural context of Bougainville, the missing people will not be at peace until they return the bones back. And it is also very important for government to take into consideration the cries of the missing persons' families, because if we don't put them in their resting places, the government will have no foundation to form a proper government."

The Autonomous Bougainville Government adopted a policy on missing persons late last year, but little has come from it so far.