WATCH: A Tribe With A Horrific Secret

First, a few facts about the Suruwahan people. They are an indigenous tribe living outside the confines of Brazilian society. They are self-sufficient, sustaining themselves by hunting. They do not feel the need to wear clothes, but they do wear colourful body paint at all times. They value beauty and strength above all other virtues.

And then it all gets a little disturbing. Because beauty and strength are not just important to this tribe. They are everything. Which is why many members of this tribe choose to kill themselves before their 30th birthday.

This is, of course, if they are born ‘normal’ to start with. The Suruwahans believe that any baby who is born deformed or who develops slowly does not have a soul. The solution is to end their lives. But it does not stop there. The ‘cursed’ babies are killed in the cruellest way possible, typically buried alive or abandoned in the jungle to be ravaged by wild animals.

This practice has persisted for years, promoted and reinforced by other tribe members. It only came to public attention when Muwaji found the courage to escape from the jungle with her disabled daughter rather than kill her. This discovery lead to the proposal of ‘Muwaji’s Law’, which was passed in 2011 by the Committee of Human Rights in Brazil. The law compelled female Suruwahans to report their pregnancies to the Brazilian government. If the government suspect that the babies are in danger of being killed, they will have them adopted.

The Suruwahan tribe has never desired the Brazilian government to intervene in their lifestyle, nor have they imposed on the outside world. Furthermore, rumour has it that the Suruwahan suicide culture began a few generations ago when outsiders killed all the tribe’s witchdoctors; thus, outside intervention has only ever been detrimental to the tribe, and the new legislation threatens to overturn their whole culture. This prompts the question: does the government have a right to enforce its power on a nation of people who choose to live outside of it, never before imposing on the outside world?

But they kill their babies, I hear you crying out. They kill themselves to escape from the natural process of ageing. It’s all so perverse. How can you even try and apply ethical relativism to something so horrific?

Yes, to those of you reading this, the Suruwahan practices are perverse. But we have to remember that, to them, it is normal, in the same way that once in the Roman Empire it was normal to watch gladiators fight to their death for entertainment. Western Europeans hunted ‘witches’ in the 16th and 17th centuries, and condoned slavery in developed countries worldwide until the 19th and 20th centuries. And now we smugly term peoples’ cultural practices as backward and primitive, because they differ from our current notion of what is right. Are the Suruwahan’s practices wrong or just drastically different to others?

Nor can we criticise their religious motivations for killing their ‘cursed’ children, when religion is still so widely practiced all over the world. In the UK alone, 49.3% of people still claim to be religious. And whilst government intervention has been necessary in the past to counteract acts of terrorism which have threatened the wider public, the actions of the Suruwahan only implicate on each other.

So what argument at all can we put forward for intervening in this tribe’s practices? One is that, unlike us, they do not have the benefit of learning about a history of mistakes. What the Suruwahans practise is a native form of eugenics, which aims to ‘improve’ populations with selective breeding. The Suruwahan do it for the same end as the Nazis did: to make their nation more powerful, and to wipe out ‘weaker’ individuals who might put a strain on their limited resources. The manifold atrocities of the Nazi period are ones that no informed human being would ever be able to condone; as a consequence, many other countries, who never practised eugenics themselves, are forewarned of the sensitivity with which they have to treat sterilisation issues. The Suruwahan, ignorant of the outside world, even go one step further: this brutal infanticide is not only depriving these babies of a lifetime but making the short life they do have into a horror story. If they were more informed, would they think twice?

Then there is a consent issue. Sure, an ethical relativist might be open to condoning sadomasochistic sexual practice between two consenting adults, providing it does not hurt anyone else. But it is a gross breach of human rights for a newborn baby to suffer under a belief system that he has no means to consent to. It is also unknown how many of these parents would be willing to murder their babies, if given an alternative to merely bowing to the pressures from their tribe.

This is an important consideration; we know now that many atrocities have occurred through history merely because people don’t know a way out of them. The Muruwaji law offers these parents an alternative: to give their baby up for adoption or provide them with medical treatment (the sad fact is that many of these ‘cursed’ babies merely suffer from easily-curable birth illnesses).

This is why the Brazilian government should be commended on their 2011 legislation. It is true that there is no definitive system of ethics in the world. Each country has a different legal system, and each religion preaches different values. But in any society, human beings should be able to make informed choices. Without this, what might be justified as ‘ethical relativism’ is merely behavioural chaos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubKS4_mM3bo&feature=youtu.be

Originally published on the Urban Times.