Posted on 03/07/2005 12:07:56 PM PST by b4its2late
CAMPBELL BAY, India (AFP) - Some 150 members of a nearly extinct aboriginal tribe are missing after deadly tsunamis that lashed India's far-flung Andaman and Nicobar islands.
But the Indian government, which administers the archipelago, says the nearly extinct Shompen tribal people, who numbered 389 before the December 26 tsunamis, were safe, although they have yet to make contact with all of them.
Before the towering waves smashed into the islands, the hunter-gatherer tribe lived in tiny bands in 12 areas among river bank mangroves, mainly bunched in Great Nicobar island's east and west.
"There's no news of seven bands of 150 Shompen who travelled down to the western coast just before the tsunamis," an Andamans' Tribal Welfare Council Council official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The western coast was hard hit by the towering waves.
"However, we have sighted some other bands by their footprints," the official told AFP in Great Nicobar's administrative capital of Campbell Bay.
The tsunamis claimed 10,749 lives in India, many of them children, while 5,640 people are still listed as missing, many of them in nearby Katchal in the Andaman and Nicobar island chain, government figures show.
But Indian government officials said the Shompen inhabitants were unscathed by the waves that ravaged the Great Nicobar island group.
"The Shompen are safe... all the aborigines are safe," Andaman's federal administrator Ram Kapse said, declining to elaborate when asked how the government knew.
"But we're trying to reach them before the onset of monsoon in mid-April," Kapse added.
India plans to build hundreds of homes, roads and government buildings washed away around Campbell Bay, site of a naval base, but so far, it has repaved just a sixth of a 35-kilometre (21-mile) tsunami-wrecked highway that leads to Shompen territory.
Several trackers working for the Tribal Welfare Council to supply rations to the Shompen once a month said several bands who travelled into the low-lying area affected by the waves had not been seen in the past two months.
"We found tracks of some Shompen but they were not the ones who went to the coastal area just before the tsunamis," said tracker Sitaram Bonyface who accompanied a team seeking the tribals in the mangroves February 3.
"Their coastal villages are also gone," Bonyface, who has been tracking Shompen since 1979 in a bid to keep count of their numbers, said in Campbell Bay, 800 kilometres (500 miles) south of the Andamanese capital Port Blair.
"The track is cold," he said.
The Shompen lived in areas around Campbell Bay.
Four other Stone Age tribes -- the 99-member Onge, 250 Sentinelese, 39 of the almost extinct Andamanese and 350 Jarawas --- have been accounted for in a post-tsunami headcount, tribal and government officials agree.
The Shompen subsist by gathering food, hunting and fishing, domestication of pigs and horticulture.
For centuries they shied away from outside contact, notably with Indians.
The Indian government has also discouraged outside contact with tribals in an effort to preserve them.
That's what happens to failed paleolithic societies. They get wiped-out by natural events that successful societies with technology can defend against. Mother Nature's a real bitch.
I'm glad Radcliffe-Brown studied them rather extensively back in the 20s and 30s. We at least have a very detailed knowledge base about them. I think these are some of the same guys he studied.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.