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View all search resultsThe vanishing of Indonesia from the heart of Papua
Beneath the machinery of state security and industrial extraction, Papua’s deepest resistance lives in what cannot be cleared: Its people’s ancestral bond to the land.
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Padaidori fishermen show their catches on a beach in the Padaido Islands, Biak Numfor regency, Papua, in this file photo published on Aug. 7, 2026. (/Image courtesy of Faizal Aziz)
E
verything, it appears, comes from Indonesia. What, then, is missing in Papua, and what actually remains there? Hundreds of thousands of hectares are transformed into vast tracts of rice, sugarcane and oil palm plantations, largely at the expense of sago, the primary staple of indigenous Papuans.
Deforestation has become synonymous with the destruction of Papua’s ecology and ancestral way of life. To enforce this transformation, dozens of army battalions have been deployed. For what purpose, and for whose benefit?
Addressing these questions, the documentary film Pesta Babi (Pig Feast) by journalist Dandhy Dwi Laksono and anthropologist Cypri Dale, screened recently in Amsterdam, poses a major challenge: Is any of this truly for the sake of the Papuan people?
Roughly 80,000 security personnel, comprising 55,000 soldiers and 26,000 police officers, are stationed to maintain "security" among a population of barely 6 million. Each soldier monitors approximately 100 citizens, while each police officer oversees 200. These ratios stand in stark contrast to the rest of Indonesia, where the average sits at roughly one soldier per 700 residents and one police officer per 600.
Under this centralized command structure, Papua was integrated into the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia (NKRI).
In political-economic terms, it first became an indispensable asset for mineral capital, catalyzed by Freeport-McMoRan’s expansive copper and gold mining operations at Ertsberg and Grasberg. Freeport even secured a special operating permit in 1967, two years prior to the formal enactment of the 1969 Foreign Investment Law.
This economic opening followed one of the region's most severe military campaigns in the wake of the 1965-1966 massacres in Java and Bali, beginning with the 1966 Biak operation in Papua. The path was cleared as the former Dutch territory was integrated into the republic through conflict in the early 1960s, the New York Agreement of 1962 and the contentious United Nations-supervised Act of Free Choice in 1969.
