Death on North Sentinel Island in 2006

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The 2006 death on North Sentinel Island is about the Indian fishermen Sunder Raj (49) and Pandit Tiwari (52) who were killed by islanders around January 26, 2006 on North Sentinel Island .

backgrounds

North Sentinel Island is part of the Andaman Archipelago in the Indian Ocean , which is administered by the Indian central government as part of the Andaman and Nicobar Union Territory . The Indian authorities forbid as a penalty to approach the " particularly endangered tribal group " and their island within three kilometers. Above all, the residents should be protected from pathogens to which they are unlikely to be immune and which could be fatal for them. For their part, the Sentinelese have long forcibly refused any attempt at contact by outsiders.

Tiwari and Raj came from Port Blair ( South Andaman Island ) and hired themselves out, partly illegally, as fishermen and shrimp catchers . They set sail from Wandoor Beach on January 24, 2006 in a borrowed fishing boat, but never returned. They were finally reported missing a day later. During a sightseeing flight with a search helicopter over North Sentinel Island on January 28, 2006, both the fishing boat and the bodies of the two men were discovered on the beach.

Possible circumstances of death

Tiwari and Raj were apparently killed by the Sentinelese. The exact circumstances of the death are unknown, and the question of whether the fishermen rowed to the coast in secret and without permission or had accidentally deviated from their course must remain open. The ethnologist Vishvajit Pandya considers it possible that the Sentinelese expected that Tiwari and Raj gifts of kind would bring as described by Indian officials and anthropologists were used to from previous contact attempts. But when they found the two men empty-handed and unable to communicate with them, they could have mistaken the strangers for fish robbers, which led to the violent killing. Samir Acharya, head of the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology , refers to the testimony of fishermen from Port Blair who found Tiwari and Raj alive on the high seas off North Sentinel Island. The two were apparently drunk, dozed off and finally drifted unnoticed to the island's beach. The Sentinelese buried Tiwari and Raj in the sand, later tidal waves uncovered the graves again. The discovery of the completely preserved corpses contradicts rumors that have long been spread that the Sentinelese practiced cannibalism .

reception

The news of the death of the two fishermen attracted worldwide attention. The ethnologists and anthropologists Pandya and Pandit criticized the type of reporting: the Western press in particular was mainly interested in portraying the Sentinelese as "brutalized savages" and "Stone Age people". Cultural and tribal backgrounds were partially deliberately hidden. They also point out that illegal fishing near the coast of North Sentinel Island threatens the welfare of the Sentinelese, as the latter are heavily dependent on the fishing grounds. The ongoing fish robbery could be another reason the Sentinelese are so aggressive with strangers. The case of Tiwari and Raj attracted renewed attention after the American John Allen Chau secretly traveled to North Sentinel Island in November 2018, despite a ban by the Indian government, and was also killed by islanders there.

literature

  • Vishvajit Pandya: The Specter of 'Hostility': The Sentinelese between Text and Image . In: In the Forest: Visual and Material Worlds of Andamanese History (1858-2006) . University Press of America, Lanham MD 2009, ISBN 978-0-7618-4153-1 .
  • Karsten Hennig: The island of primitive men: The primitive people of the Sentinelese in conflict with modern times . neobooks, Munich 2015, ISBN 3738027254 , p. 79.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rohan Smith: Uncontacted tribe on North Sentinel Island left to fend for themselves, as they should be , report from August 11, 2015 on news.com , (English).
  2. ↑ Peter Foster: Stone Age tribe kills fishermen who strayed on to island , report dated February 8, 2006 on telegraph.co.uk .
  3. ↑ Vinay K. Srivastava: The Sentinelese (PDF: 1.5 MB, 16 pages). National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST), New Delhi June 27, 2018 (English; Powerpoint presentation at the PVTGs seminar Conservation of Particularly Vulnerable Tribes of Andaman and Nicobar Islands; Anthropology Professor, University of New Delhi, Anthropological Survey of India ).
  4. ↑ Le Monde , AFP: America tué par la tribu des Sentinelles: l'Inde appelée à laisser le corps sur l'île. In: LeMonde.fr. November 28, 2018, accessed February 5, 2019 (French).
  5. ^ A b Peter Foster: Stone Age tribe kills fishermen who strayed on to island , report dated February 8, 2006 on telegraph.co.uk . , (English).
  6. ↑ a b c d Vishvajit Pandya: The Specter of 'Hostility'. Pp. 326, 333, 364.
  7. ↑ Kate Harris: Where Not to Travel in 2019, or Ever . In: The Walrus, February 15, 2019. (English)