Chair, Expert Council to the Indonesian Bar Association (Peradi, RBA)
Director, Amnesty International Indonesia
Jakarta, June 2026
The Indonesian government’s response to the documentary Pesta Babi: Kolonialisme di Jaman Kita (Pig Feast: Colonialism in Our Time) exemplifies the traditional idiom, “blaming the mirror for an ugly reflection.” This metaphor accurately describes an institutional reluctance to engage in self-reflection, wherein authorities choose to suppress critical feedback rather than address the underlying governance failures.
The documentary provides a critical examination of the displacement of Indigenous communities, driven by state-led deforestation of over 2.5 million hectares in South Papua. These clearances support large-scale agricultural ventures, including palm oil and sugarcane plantations, alongside national food estate programs framed under the rubrics of “food security” and “energy transition.” To secure these National Strategic Projects (PSN), the state has deployed a joint framework involving military forces, a manifestation of state power that exacerbates human rights vulnerabilities in an already volatile region.
By documenting environmental degradation and chronic state violence, the film serves as a catalyst for public accountability, threatening the historical impunity enjoyed by state actors in the region. Papua has long functioned as an exceptional zone for civil liberties within Indonesia, characterized by disproportionate human rights violations — including arbitrary detentions, unlawful killings, torture, and state-mandated internet blackouts — perpetrated with minimal legal recourse.
The documentary’s rapid dissemination, securing over 13 million views via the Jubi media outlet within its first two weeks, demonstrates a significant public appetite for uncensored regional reporting. The documentary has achieved unprecedented domestic reach, securing over 11,000 screening requests and executing at least 1,800 public viewings across the Indonesian archipelago. This widespread distribution underscores a structural failure in traditional state censorship mechanisms when confronting digitized, community-led information networks.
Instead, the state has neutralized the critique by disrupting at least 52 venues of public screenings nationwide. This strategy extends to judicial retaliation against the filmmakers, evidenced by the planned investigation launched against producer Dandhy Dwi Laksono and a local pro-bono legal defender. The legal challenge was initiated by Mama Yasinta Moiwend, an Indigenous woman from the Malind tribe featured in the documentary, who alleges that her likeness was used without prior consent and has demanded the film’s withdrawal.
However, the litigation brought by Mama Yasinta — who suddenly secured private legal representation — has generated significant controversy, particularly following allegations by her family regarding her abrupt relocation from Papua to Jakarta. Given her socio-economic constraints, the logistics of financing an unannounced journey from Wogikel Village in the Merauke Regency to the capital — a complex multi-modal transit involving maritime, overland, and air routes — raise questions regarding external facilitation. Family accounts indicate she departed Merauke on May 24 without collective consultation. While external observers respect her formal legal stance, her sudden alignment with state narratives contrasts sharply with her historical trajectory as a vocal opponent of the PSN and a defender of customary land rights.
The reception and state repression of the documentary Pesta Babi mirror the historical trajectories of Joshua Oppenheimer’s seminal films on the 1965–66 massacres, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014). Nationally, Oppenheimer’s films generated extensive public engagement, registering thousands of screenings despite facing aggressive disruptions from military and paramilitary factions prior to their formal prohibition by the Film Censorship Board (LSF). This historical precedent demonstrates that state-enforced censorship inadvertently stimulates public curiosity, driving civic networks to utilize decentralized digital platforms and clandestine viewings to successfully bypass state control.
The Pesta Babi phenomenon represents a critical paradigm shift for Indonesia to really look at Papua from the eyes of the Papuans, and stop looking on it from Jakarta’s perspective. Historically, central government policies have operated under a framework that treats the easternmost province as a vacant territory — a concept actively contested by local populations through the counter-campaign “Papua Bukan Tanah Kosong” (Papua is Not an Empty Land). This state perspective reduces the region from a cultural homeland to a mere repository of natural resources. Their voices have been ignored and supressed while the government continues exploits its natural resources.
Public awareness generated by screenings of Pesta Babi will inevitably create a political backlash for the government if suppression tactics persist. Consequently, the authorities must evaluate chronic policy failures in Papua and adopt the perspective of the local population as fellow Indonesian citizens. This aligns with the populist rhetoric frequently utilized by President Prabowo Subianto, whose emphasis on the “people” must be translated into substantive policy. To address this crisis effectively, Jakarta’s evaluation of its relationship with Papua must establish three primary institutional reforms:
First, demilitarization of Papua is urgently necessary because the film strips the concept of a “security approach” of its bureaucratic abstraction. What audiences encounter is not security as policy but militarization as lived experience. Fear becomes visible in children’s eyes; uncertainty spreads through peasant and fisher communities; rituals are interrupted as everyday life is reorganized around force; villages are treated as operational zones. This deployment of military presence in Papua cannot be credibly justified as defense administration or a constitutional civic mission. It functions instead as a mechanism that reshapes social life through coercion, producing danger rather than protection.
The public screenings carry a clear political and ethical demand: demilitarization through the withdrawal of non-organic military battalions. This position is not animated by an anti-security sentiment. It insists on a form of security that does not treat citizens as threats and that does not require violence to govern. In a period when authoritarian development models enlist soldiers to “secure” projects, Pesta Babi reframes the question of security by asking “secure for whom.” The film’s core argument is that the presence of soldiers in Papua does not serve Papuans’ safety.
Second, the government must impose a moratorium on all concession permits tied to PSN, particularly in the last remaining rainforest areas. This is especially relevant to food estate projects in Papua. Authoritarian development often treats land as an accounting instrument—measured in hectares, processed through permit regimes, and justified through GDP targets. Pesta Babi disrupts that logic by returning land to its human meaning. Through ritual, pigs, and mourning, the film presents land simultaneously as kitchen, cemetery, and cathedral, while also suggesting that it functions as the material basis of daily sustenance. The underlying critique is not merely environmental; it is about the erasure of life-worlds and the conversion of communal belonging into resource extraction.
As a result, the documentary shifts public debate from “investment versus environment” to “life versus erasure.” After watching the film, a growing number of Indonesians call for halting the PSN project in Papua and for stopping concession practices that convert customary forests without meaningful consultation with indigenous Papuan communities. This response directly challenges a development model that prioritizes speed and scale over consultation, participation, and rights. The controversy becomes legible as a question of political legitimacy, not only ecological harm.
Finally, since Pesta Babi has expanded public attention to Papua, Jakarta should move from monologue to rights-respecting dialogue. The film’s implied standard is a conversation among equals — without weapons on the table and without prejudice in the room. This demand is not unprecedented. In 2022, Indonesian official delegates and pro-independence leaders met in Geneva to explore pathways toward talks and agreed on what was described as a “humanitarian pause for Papua.” The intention was not only to enable humanitarian assistance for at least 100,000 internally displaced persons and to reduce violence intensified since early 2019, but also to establish longer-term confidence-building measures toward enduring peace.
Pesta Babi is a rare and difficult-to-repeat film. It arrives when silence has lasted too long and when moral distance has been used to justify harm. It leaves behind a quiet longing: for honesty, for space to speak, and for Papuans to be recognized as people with human dignity rather than as threats to be managed. The government must therefore respond not with denial or image management but with the willingness to look at the mirror the film holds up — and to avoid destroying it, even when that reflection is uncomfortable and damaging.
—
Telah dipublikasikan sebelumnya di The Jakarta Post
