The Political Economy of Papuan Dispossession: Alcohol and Land

The Political Economy of Papuan Dispossession: Alcohol and Land

A saying heard in Papuan towns sums up the political economy of Indonesian rule in a single sentence. Its meaning goes beyond a bottle and a land title. It is about who consumes and who accumulates, and who disappears and who stays.

“Orang Papua jual tanah untuk beli alkohol; orang Indonesia jual alkohol untuk beli Tanah Papua.”

(Papuan people sell their land to buy alcohol; Indonesian people sell alcohol to buy Papuan land).

You can hear this saying in the markets of Jayapura, Wamena, Nabire and Merauke. People say it half as a joke and half as a lament. It is bitter because it is accurate. Much of what needs to be understood about the political economy of Indonesian occupation in Tanah Papua is contained in it: a person’s immediate vulnerability becomes another person’s opportunity to acquire territory.

The two sides of the transaction are not equal. One side risk exchanging an ancestral inheritance for temporary consumption. The other turns the sale of a consumable commodity into ownership of an enduring territorial asset. What one party drinks becomes what the other party builds on. A bottle is emptied in a night, while a plot of land, once alienated, can be lost for generations.

More than a transaction

The tragedy is not only that land changes hands. Land changes hands everywhere. The tragedy is what Papuan land is, and what it is turned into.

For Papuans, land is not real estate. It holds memory, ancestry and identity. It is where clans are named and the dead are buried, and it is where food, water, medicine and the meaning of a life come from. In Lani understanding, a person does not own the land so much as belong to it. A people’s place in the cosmos is written into the mountains, rivers and gardens their ancestors walked.

When that land is reduced to a commodity and sold for cash, often to settle a debt, pay for a funeral or buy drink, something larger than a parcel of ground is lost. It is the material foundation of a people’s future. A clan that sells its land does not just lose an asset. It loses the ground on which it can continue to exist as itself.

The structure behind the saying

It would be easy, and wrong, to read the saying as a story about Papuan weakness. That reading is exactly how colonial power prefers to explain itself: the native is careless and the settler is prudent. The saying actually describes a structure, and the structure does not run in both directions.

Papuans did not invent the conditions under which they now trade land for consumption. Decades of military operations, displacement, transmigration, resource extraction and the dismantling of customary authority have produced those conditions. Many highland and coastal communities live with deep poverty, trauma, unemployment and a cash economy they were pulled into rather than one they built. In such conditions, alcohol is not a free choice made on a level field. It is often an anaesthetic for a wound that is still open.

The trade that dispenses the anaesthetic is concentrated in non-Papuan hands, from the kiosks and distributors to the networks that supply them. So is much of the capital that buys the land when a desperate seller appears. The same economy that profits from Papuan suffering is positioned to collect what that suffering forces Papuans to sell.

That is the arithmetic of occupation in its quietest form. No soldier needs to fire a shot. Nothing appears in the news. A bottle is sold, a debt grows, and a signature transfers a hillside. Repeated across thousands of families and decades, small exchanges like these redraw the map of ownership in Tanah Papua as surely as any decree from Jakarta.

Consumption and accumulation

The heart of the saying is the difference between what is consumed and what is accumulated.

Alcohol is consumed. It leaves the drinker, the household and the clan poorer than before, and nothing is left afterwards except a hangover, a broken family, sometimes a death.

Land is accumulated. It stays, it rises in value, and it can be passed on. It becomes the base for shops, plantations, housing, churches, offices and settlements that will stand long after the person who sold it is gone. It also becomes the ground on which the settler population grows and the Papuan population, in proportion, shrinks.

This is why the issue is political and not only social. Land is the final form of sovereignty. A people who no longer hold their land have little left to defend, and a state that controls the land does not need the people’s consent. Seen this way, the slow transfer of Papuan land through the economics of vulnerability is a form of dispossession that goes further than the flag. It runs through the market, the family and the body, and it is harder to resist because it looks like individual choice.

Papua’s leaders have seen it

Papuan leaders have long recognised the danger. Church leaders, customary councils and provincial authorities have repeatedly tried to restrict the sale of alcohol, including through a provincial regulation prohibiting it. Customary institutions have campaigned against selling tanah adat, the communal land held under customary right that Papua’s Special Autonomy framework formally recognises. Yet regulations on paper have struggled against weak enforcement, commercial interests and a wider development agenda that treats Papuan land as an empty frontier waiting for national projects, plantations and food estates.

When large state-backed projects claim hundreds of thousands of hectares in the south, and kiosks sell drink in highland towns, the scales differ but the logic is the same. Papuan land moves out of Papuan hands, and Papuans are left with less to stand on.

What the saying asks of Papuans

The saying is not only an accusation against the coloniser. It is also a warning to Papuans.

It asks every Papuan family, clan and community to see the transaction clearly. Ancestral land is not a currency for today’s emergency. It is the inheritance of children not yet born. Once it is sold, the bottle it buys will be empty within hours, but the loss may last for a hundred years.

It also asks Papuan leaders, churches and institutions to treat alcohol and land as one problem rather than two. Fighting alcohol without protecting customary land leaves the door open. Protecting land without healing the wounds that drive people to drink leaves the pressure in place. Survival depends on doing both: holding the land collectively so that no single moment of despair can sell it, and rebuilding the communities and economies that make despair less likely.

The arithmetic must change

Everything is in that one sentence. Papuans sell land to buy alcohol, and Indonesians sell alcohol to buy Papuan land. One people consumes and loses, the other sells and gains. One people’s vulnerability becomes another’s territory.

As long as that arithmetic holds, the occupation does not need to win any argument. It only needs to keep the bottles flowing and the land offices open.

Alcohol disappears through consumption. Ancestral land, once alienated, may be lost for generations. For Papuans the question is whether they will still be standing on their own ground when the drinking stops.