India cops face-off with tribe
Authorities trying to avoid disrupting pre-neolithic people
PORT BLAIR ( India): Indian officers had a nervous long-distance face-off with the tribe who killed an American missionary, in their latest bid to locate his body on a remote island, police said.
The police team, who took a boat just off Indian-owned North Sentinel island on Saturday, spotted men from the Sentinelese tribe on the beach where John Allen Chau was last seen, the region’s police chief Dependra Pathak said.
Using binoculars, officers – in a police boat about 400 metres from the shore – saw the men armed with bows and arrows, the weapons reportedly used by the isolated tribe to kill Chau as he shouted Christian phrases at them.
“They stared at us and we were looking at them,” said Pathak. The boat withdrew to avoid any chance of a confrontation.
Police are taking painstaking efforts to avoid any disruption to the Sentinelese – a pre-neolithic tribe whose island is off-limits to outsiders – as they seek Chau’s body.
Chau went to “share the love of Jesus,” said Mary Ho, international executive leader of All Nations, a Kansas City, Missouri-based organization that helped train Chau, discussed the risks with him and sent him on the mission, to support him in his “life’s calling,” she added.
“He wanted to have a long-term relationship, and if possible, to be accepted by them and live amongst them,” she said.
When a young boy tried to hit him with an arrow on his first day on the island, Chau swam back to the fishing boat he had arranged to wait for him offshore.
The arrow, he wrote, hit a Bible he was carrying.
“Why did a little kid have to shoot me today?” he wrote in his notes, which he left with the fishermen before swimming back the next morning. “His high-pitched voice still lingers in my head.”
Police say Chau knew the Sentinelese resisted all contact by outsiders, firing arrows and spears at passing helicopters and killing fishermen who drift onto their shore.
His notes, which were reported Thursday in Indian newspapers and confirmed by police, make clear he knew he might be killed.
“I DON’T WANT TO DIE,” wrote Chau, who appeared to want to bring Christianity to the islanders.
“Would it be wiser to leave and let someone else to continue? No, I don’t think so.”
The death of the 27-year-old on Nov 17 has cast a new spotlight on efforts to protect one of the world’s last “uncontacted” tribes whose language and customs remain a mystery to outsiders.
Fishermen who took Chau to North Sentinel – which is one of the Andaman and Nicobar islands in the Bay of Bengal – said they saw the tribe burying the body on the beach.
The Sentinelese normally attack anyone who goes to the island.
Pathak said police are monitoring to see if there is a repeat of an incident after two fishermen who strayed onto the island were killed in 2006.
One week after their deaths, the bodies of the two Indians were hooked on bamboo stakes facing out to sea. “It was a kind of scarecrow,” Pathak said.
“We are studying the 2006 case. We are asking anthropologists what they do when they kill an outsider,” the police chief added.
“We are trying to understand the group psychology.”
Though Chau’s death is officially a murder case, anthropologists say it may be impossible to retrieve the American’s body and that no charges will be made against the protected tribe.
Seven people, including six fishermen who were involved in ferrying Chau to North Sentinel, have been arrested.
Anthropologists and tribal welfare experts who have had the previous rare contacts with the Sentinelese have been heavily involved with the inquiry.