Karen people in the Andaman Islands Puns

Do a Google search for Jarawa and you'll see that these are people clearly of African origin. Did they end up on islands under Indian sovereignty by continental drift or did they sail eastward and settle on the Andaman Islands?

For anyone unfamiliar with the case I’m referring to, here is a link to an article on India Today

North Sentinel Island, and the tribe who inhabit it, the Sentinelese, are protected by the Indian government as ‘uncontacted’. It is illegal to travel within 3 miles of the island. The tribe themselves are not subject to Indian law and cannot be arrested. These restrictions are intended to protect both parties: outsiders due to the history of violence and attacks those entering the island have been subjected to, and the tribe themself due to the risk of outsiders spreading disease to this extremely isolated and therefore vulnerable population.

This position is in itself an ethical grey area, with some making counter- arguments that these people could benefit from development. (as an aside, I find myself conflicted about all of this - is it hegemonic and paternalistic to impose another way of living on them, or is it irresponsible to deny the possibility of positive, well-planned contact that could help ensure their longer term survival?)

But to get back to this recent case, the American missionary allegedly paid some fisherman from a neighboring island $350 to take him to North Sentinel Island. He’d researched the tribe thoroughly for years beforehand and evidence suggests he was well aware of the dangers, but he apparently had such a strong conviction about spreading the word of Jesus to them that he was willing to take the risk. Maybe because I’m not religious and I struggle to justify evangelical behavior, but I find his position stupidly misguided and arrogant in the extreme: entirely indefensible on moral grounds given the risk his contact posed to the people he aimed to help ‘save’.

Now to get to the point I want to debate, in the case of the fisherman who have now been arrested in connection with his murder, I do not agree that they are guilty of anything beyond illegally entering a restricted area. They apparently warned the man of the dangers but he said he wanted to go anyway. Like a cab driver taking a naive tourist into a gangland, I don’t believe they are culpable for the consequences. Yes, they knew he risked death, and they likely also knew he could have wiped out the tribe by spreading disease, but to me, they were simply responding to market forces; it’s not their place to be the moral arbiters of their clien

I really want to visit Koh Lipe but by the time I could theoretically get to that part of Thailand it'll be well into June.