Washed-up poison bottle kills eight members of island tribe

For more than 150 years they have been fighting what seems like an irreversible decline. The Onge tribe of the Andaman Islands, which numbered 670 at the end of the 19th century, has gradually dwindled to about 100 members. Or at least that was the estimate before a group of the men apparently found what they thought was a bottle of alcohol washed ashore.

It was a fatal mistake; at least eight of the men have died after drinking what transpired to be poison. A further 15 are in hospital and one is critically ill. In an instant, the tribe's population has been slashed by almost 10 per cent. The discovery of the bottle was in effect an act of decimation.

"This is a calamity for the Onge," said Stephen Corry, the director of the London-based charity Survival. "If any more die, it could put the survival of the entire tribe in serious danger." The Onge are one of four indigenous tribes of the Andamans, a cluster of islands about 700 miles (1100km) south of the Indian mainland. Two of the tribes – the Jarawa and the Sentinelese – have no, or limited, contact with outsiders and the Greater Andamanese total just 50 people.



The numbers of the Onge have plunged since Britain established a penal colony in the Andamans in the 1850s. Reports suggest troops killed a number the tribe while at the same time the establishment of settlements saw more people encroaching on what had been their exclusive territory.

More recently, the threat has been that of alcohol. Much like the Aboriginal people of Australia and the Native Americans of the United States, alcohol has had a devastating effect on the former hunter-gatherer community, which is now dependent on food aid. The Indian authorities have supposedly prohibited the sale of alcohol to the tribes but some shopkeepers are happy to profit from illicit sales.

"These guys are addicted to alcohol," said Denis Giles, a journalist and activist who lives on the islands. "The Jarawas and the Sentinelese do not consume alcohol. They are safe. But the Onge are picking up all the bad things from our society rather than giving us their good things." The authorities have ordered an investigation to discover whether the men died after drinking poison that had been washed ashore – as has been reported – or from somewhere else.