Encounter with the devils

In: Index on censorship, Band 25, Heft 6, S. 26-39

Abstract

More than three hundred years ago the nutmeg groves of Buru Island were burnt by the soldiers of the Dutch East Indies Trading Company. Fruit dissolved to ash; seeds, carried away by the wind, landed on barren earth. A savanna formed and the island's nutmeg trade was wiped out forever. Forced to leave their coastal settlements, the island's inhabitants were gradually absorbed in the embrace of the forest. They became hunters and gatherers; their only farming implement, a kind of spear used to poke holes in the soil. Arab traders who visited the island called these people 'Alfuru,' 'the people of the interior.' Over the course of three and a half centuries little changed on this island. It was a stagnant world of malaria, filariasis, tiling ringworm, parasites and tuberculosis, a continuum of intertribal warfare and intervillage disputes. And then there came a most historic time, August 1969, when Buru Island became a prison camp for more than 10 thousand political prisoners.