#shompen

Who are the Shompen?

The Shompen are an indigenous culture that lives in the Great Nicobar Island, which is nowadays owned by India. The Shompen and their ancestors are believed to have been living in this island for around 10,000 years. Like other tribes in the nearby islands, the Shompen are isolated from the rest of the world, as they chose to be left alone, with the exception of a few members who occasionally take part in exchanges with foreigners and go on quarantine before returning to their tribe. There are between 100 and 400 Shompen people, who are hunter-gatherers and nomadic agricultors and rely on their island's rainforest for survival.

Why is there risk of genocide?

India has announced a huge construction mega-project that will completely change the Great Nicobar Island to turn it into "the Hong Kong of India".

Nowadays, the island has 8,500 inhabitants, and over 95% of its surface is made up of national parks, protected forests and tribal reserve areas. Much of the island is covered by the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve, described by UNESCO as covering “unique and threatened tropical evergreen forest ecosystems. It is home to very rich ecosystems, including 650 species of angiosperms, ferns, gymnosperms, and bryophytes, among others. In terms of fauna, there are over 1800 species, some of which are endemic to this area. It has one of the best-preserved tropical rain forests in the world.”

The Indian project aims to destroy this natural environment to create an international shipping terminal with the capacity to handle 14.2 million TEUs (unit of cargo capacity), an international airport that will handle a peak hour traffic of 4,000 passengers and that will be used as a joint civilian-military airport under the control of the Indian Navy, a gas and solar power plant, a military base, an industrial park, and townships aimed at bringing in tourism, including commercial, industrial and residential zones as well as other tourism-related activities.

This project means the destruction of the island's pristine rainforests, as it involves cutting down over 852,000 trees and endangers the local fauna such as leatherback turtles, saltwater crocodiles, Nicobar crab-eating macaque and migratory birds. The erosion resulting from deforestation will be huge in this highly-seismic area. Experts also warn about the effects that this project will have on local flora and fauna as a result of pollution from the terminal project, coastal surface runoff, ballasts from ships, physical collisions with ships, coastal construction, oil spills, etc.

The indigenous people are not only affected because their environment and food source will be destroyed. On top of this, the demographic change will be a catastrophe for them. After the creation of this project, the Great Nicobar Island -which now has 8,500 inhabitants- will receive a population of 650,000 settlers. Remember that the Shompen and Nicobarese people who live on this island are isolated, which means they do not have an immune system that can resist outsider illnesses. Academics believe they could die of disease if they come in contact with outsiders (think of the arrival of Europeans to the Americas after Christopher Columbus and the way that common European illnesses were lethal for indigenous Americans with no immunization against them).

And on top of all of this, the project might destroy the environment and the indigenous people just to turn out to be useless and sooner or later be abandoned. The naturalist Uday Mondal explains that “after all the destruction, the financial viability of the project remains questionable as all the construction material will have to be shipped to this remote island and it will have to compete with already well-established ports.” However, this project is important to India because they want to use the island as a military and commercial post to stop China's expansion in the region, since the Nicobar islands are located on one of the world's busiest sea routes.

Last year, 70 former government officials and ambassadors wrote to the Indian president saying the project would “virtually destroy the unique ecology of this island and the habitat of vulnerable tribal groups”. India's response has been to say that the indigenous tribes will be relocated "if needed", but that doesn't solve the problem. As a spokesperson for human rights group Survival International said: “The Shompen are nomadic and have clearly defined territories. Four of their semi-permanent settlements are set to be directly devastated by the project, along with their southern hunting and foraging territories. The Shompen will undoubtedly try to move away from the area destroyed, but there will be little space for them to go. To avoid a genocide, this deadly mega-project must be scrapped.”

On 7 February 2024, 39 scholars from 13 countries published an open letter to the Indian president warning that “If the project goes ahead, even in a limited form, we believe it will be a death sentence for the Shompen, tantamount to the international crime of genocide.”

How to help

The NGO Survival International has launched this campaign:

From this site, you just need to add your name and email and you will send an email to India's Tribal Affairs Minister and to the companies currently vying to build the first stage of the project.

Share it with your friends and acquittances and on social media.

Sources:

India’s plan for untouched Nicobar isles will be ‘death sentence’ for isolated tribe, 7 Feb 2024. The Guardian.

‘It will destroy them’: Indian mega-development could cause ‘genocide’ and ‘ecocide’, says charity, 8 Feb 2024. Geographical.

Genocide experts call on India's government to scrap the Great Nicobar mega-project, Feb 2024. Survival International.

The container terminal that could sink the Great Nicobar Island, 20 July 2022. Mongabay.

The Indian government is building a huge megadevelopment on Great Nicobar island, where an uncontacted tribe called the Shompen live.

They're going to cut down huge swathes of rainforest, Survival International are calling it genocidal, and as of February 2026 it's got the green light.

Tbh I'm not keen on the article below mentioning turtles first, then the Shompen, and moving back to plants and animals, but it gives a good overview.

Do you have 1 minute? Add your name, surname and email to send a pre-written email to India's Tribal Affairs Minister, other Indian government ministers, and the companies vying to build the project:

1. There are only about 400 Shompen people at most, not billions.

2. Every human life has a right to exist, nobody deserves to be killed to make space for an industrial/military/tourist estate.

3. Every culture is worthy, genocide is bad. I can't believe I have to say this, but apparently it needs to be repeated.

4. A big part of my post was talking about the ecocide, how this will impact the whole island's ecosystem. I explicitly talked about the effects on the rainforest and the some of its animal species (leatherback turtles, saltwater crocodiles, Nicobar crab-eating macaque and migratory birds) and how deforestation will create further problems linked to erosion. That being said, there are not many species being threatened with extinction (only the human culture, the Shompen, are). Most of these species exist outside of Great Nicobar. This doesn't mean that this island should be destroyed.

5. Indigenous survival and the ecosystem the culture lives in are deeply tied. You don't have to choose one or the other. Stopping India's plan on Great Nicobar will save both.

6. You can care about more than one thing at a time.

7. I am not an expert in biology, so I choose not to talk too much about topics outside of my area of expertise where I could make a mistake. I am an archaeologist, so I have studied anthropology in detail, plus I've been involved in activism for occupied territories for most of my life, since I'm from one of them. It's a good thing that people post about what they know and not about what they don't know, that would just be muddying the waters.

via: survivalinternational Uncontacted tribal people on an Indian island face genocide in the name of 'mega development'. The Shompen, one of Earth's most isolated tribes, are at risk of being wiped out for a 'Hong Kong of India' project.

Watch this video made by @fairplanet_ (on Instagram) in collaboration with Survival.

via: survivalinternational

ALERT: 300 Shompen people - most uncontacted - live on an island in the Indian Ocean.

Their rainforest home is about to be destroyed by a plan to turn their island into "the Hong Kong of India"