Who Pays the Price of Development?

Watching Pesta Babi *made me question something I used to think belonged safely in the past: colonialism.

*A Documentary Movie

For a long time, I imagined colonialism as something visible and direct. It meant foreign control, violence, occupation, and land taken by force. It was something I associated with history books, not necessarily with the language of development today. But the film made me realize that power does not always need to look brutal to be destructive. Sometimes, it works through policies, investments, and promises that sound reasonable from the outside.

When exploitation is wrapped in the language of development, it becomes easier to justify. Once a project is framed as necessary for growth, the land is no longer treated as a living space, and the people who depend on it are pushed aside. Natural resources are reduced into economic value, while things that are deeply alive are turned into numbers, targets, and plans.

This is where Pesta Babi became difficult to watch. The violence is not only in how development is explained, but also in how it is enforced. With military presence involved, development no longer feels like a neutral word. It feels like pressure, fear, and the loss of people’s control over their own land.

The part that stayed with me most was the paradox of clean energy. On paper, the transition away from fossil fuels sounds necessary. The world does need to rethink the way it produces and consumes energy. But the film made me think about what happens when the road toward a greener future is still built with the same extractive mindset.

Biodiesel and bioethanol are promoted as part of energy self-sufficiency. Nickel is mined for electric vehicles. Forests are cleared for biofuel. Natural resources continue to be taken to meet global demand. The vocabulary may change, but the people who carry the burden often remain the same: local communities, masyarakat adat, and those whose lives are closest to the land.

So the question is not only whether an energy source is cleaner than fossil fuel. The question is whether the process behind it is just.

Because if one place gets to imagine a cleaner future while another place has to lose its forest, its water, its land, and its way of life, then the problem has not disappeared. It has only been moved somewhere else.

This is why the film felt bigger than Papua alone. Papua is central, of course, but the pattern is familiar in many resource-rich places. Land is taken, raw materials are extracted, commodities are sold cheaply, and the finished products return with much higher value. The people living closest to the resources are often the ones furthest from the benefits.

Indonesia is constantly described as a rich country, with its forests, minerals, seas, biodiversity, and culture. We grow up hearing that as something to be proud of. But the more I think about it, the more painful it becomes. If the country is so rich, why does that richness still feel so distant from so many people?

At some point, it becomes hard not to ask whether the problem is really that we cannot manage our own resources, or whether the system has been built in a way that keeps wealth concentrated in only a few hands.

The film also made me think about how political power often speaks in a language that feels far removed from ordinary people’s lives. Economic growth, investment, national interest, and strategic industries may sound clean in official documents. But on the ground, the impact can be painfully simple: someone loses their land. Someone loses access to the forest. Someone loses the place that carries their history, identity, and survival.

That is what makes this kind of development so disturbing. It asks people to sacrifice something deeply personal for a future they may never benefit from.

Personally, I cried three times while watching the film. Not because of one specific scene, but because of the accumulation of everything it made me feel. Anger, sadness, disbelief, and a kind of helplessness.

It is painful to watch a country that has always been celebrated for its natural wealth slowly lose the very things that make it alive. It is even more painful when that loss does not only come from outside forces, but also through decisions made by its own people.

Maybe our biggest problem has never been a lack of resources. We already have more than enough. What we are losing is the collective awareness that development should never matter more than the people and nature it claims to serve.

In the end, Pesta Babi is not only a film about Papua, mining, or energy. It is a reminder that modern society can repeat colonial patterns without calling them colonialism. Land can still be taken. People can still be pushed aside. Wealth can still flow upward. The only difference is that today, the language sounds cleaner.

And maybe that is exactly why we need to be more careful.

Because if development can only stand on taken land, cleared forests, and sacrificed communities, then the real question is not how much we have developed.

The real question is: who has to disappear so that development can look successful?