• 3 days ago
"Every day, tourists travel in SUV convoys, escorted by the Indian army, to take pictures of the Jarawa and throw bananas at them."

Human safaris, kidnappings and forced labour... The Jarawa are threatened by an abject tourism.

Category

🐳
Animals
Transcript
00:00There are women in Jarawa who have been kidnapped, raped,
00:03and those in Jarawa who have been taken away for forced labor,
00:05and the children who have died.
00:30Jarawa is an Afro-Asian people who live in the south of Burma,
00:47on the Andaman Islands, which belong to India.
00:49And this people left Africa 70,000 years ago.
00:52So the Jarawa are among the first human migrations
00:55who left Africa and who are our ancestors to all.
00:58At the time, you have to know that from the Burmese coast to Papua,
01:03it was a single continent.
01:05The water level was much lower because of the ice.
01:08We were in the middle of the ice age.
01:10And so when the water rose, when the ice melted,
01:12the Jarawa were isolated on this island,
01:14and they were isolated from the world for 50,000 years.
01:17And it's been barely 20 years since they've been in contact
01:22with the Indians who are coming more and more to populate these islands,
01:27which have become a popular tourist destination for the Onemuners,
01:32for people who go on vacation and on a trip to Denos.
01:49They are threatened at the same time by abject tourism,
01:54because in the main city of Andaman, in Port Blair,
01:58the tourist agencies organize photo safaris
02:02along a road that crosses the territory of the Jarawa.
02:05And so every day there are lucky tourists,
02:08because it's still expensive to go there,
02:10who travel in convoys, in 4x4.
02:13They are escorted by the Indian army,
02:16and their goal is to take photos of the Jarawa and throw bananas at them.
02:20All this story was found in the press in 2012.
02:23It was a journalist from The Guardian who released a video
02:26filmed along this road by an Indian police officer,
02:29and it was the starting point of our investigation.
02:32And then we learned that the Jarawa had been taken out several times
02:35to complain to the Indian authorities in the local police stations,
02:40of poaching.
02:42But there are Jarawa women who have been kidnapped, who have been raped,
02:45and the Jarawa who have been taken away to work by force,
02:48and children who are dead because they were given bad drugs.
02:51And so we realized that this people,
02:53who had always fiercely refused any contact with the outside world,
02:57had come to the point where they wanted to communicate
03:00and express their grief and also their will,
03:03their desire for self-determination.
03:19The story has already been written for the Onji,
03:22and we must absolutely prevent it from being reproduced,
03:27from being repeated for the Jarawa.