07 January 2005	Friday	25 Ziqa'ad 1425

PORT BLAIR: Indian authorities have evacuated dozens of the world's most primitive people from their tsunami-hit homelands in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, potentially exposing them to unwelcome outside influence.

More than two dozen of the dwindling Great Andamanese tribe were moved from a government reserve on Strait Island to a guesthouse in the capital, Port Blair, after their homes and habitat were destroyed.

Eight members of the tiny hunter-gatherer Shompen tribe were also flown out by helicopter after their settlement on Great Nicobar Island was submerged. They have been settled in relief camps on a nearby island, a government officer said on Thursday.

"We had to do it, there wasn't a choice. The area has become distressed," said K.C. Ghoshal, assistant commissioner in the tribal welfare department. He said aerial surveys suggested the rest of the nearly 400-strong Shompens, who lived in the forests and hills on the island, had survived the tsunami.

Ghoshal said the Shompens, who almost never leave their island, have been kept in a special area in Campbell Bay Island to protect them from external influence. "We are very aware of the dangers involved in unnecessary exposure."

The cluster of more than 550 islands, of which only about three dozen are inhabited, are home to six tribes of Mongoloid and African origin who have lived there for thousands of years.

Many of these tribal people subsist by hunting with spears, bows and arrows, and by fishing and gathering fruit and roots. They still cover themselves with tree bark or leaves.

Many of the tribes have been gradually exposed to outside influences since colonial rule and their numbers have steadily dwindled over the same period, making many anthropologists pessimistic about their longer-term chances of survival.

"Moving them out from their natural habitats is certainly a cause for concern. You wouldn't want them to be exposed to our culture," said Samir Acharya, who runs the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology.

"I am sure they wouldn't be happy being brought out either, and the faster we return them to their homes, huts whatever, it's better." Among the most exposed - and most threatened - are the Great Andamanese, who now number just 49.

Once a large and fierce tribe of around 10,000 people, the Great Andamanese were defeated in an 1859 battle against British forces, who conducted a series of punitive expeditions over the decades that followed. Their numbers continued to fall from conflicts with Indian settlers, death and disease. -Reuters