For nearly five months a bloody sabotage campaign by rebel landowners on the island of Bougainville has idled one of the world's largest copper mines and terrorized the town of Panguna and its environs. The rebels are seeking higher royalties from the mine's joint owners, an Australian company and the government of Papua New Guinea, an island nation in the southwest Pacific.
The spiral of bloodletting, which began in November, escalated last week, when landowners raided a mining camp, killing four people and setting houses ablaze. An angry mob from the settlement retaliated by slaughtering a Bougainvillean woman and her baby...