Oswald Iten, a Swiss journalist and photographer, ventured in March 1986 to Mindanao to investigate the reality behind the Tasaday who in the 1970s became famous as Stone Age cave people living lost in the jungle. The area was closed off by President Marcos as no-go reserve allegedly to protect the Stone Age tribesmen. Iten arrived there just days after the fall of Marcos in March 1986. He found the former Tasaday revealing to him how they were misused to play their part in a hoax set up by Manuel Elizalde, the Marcos Minister for national minorities.
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Oswald Iten / vita
Oswald Iten was born in 1950, lives in Switzerland.
During the time of his studies Iten started to work as a journalist and photographer. In 1969 he was accredited to the press corps attending the start of Apollo 11. In 1971 he began writing for Switzerland’s «Neue Zürcher Zeitung» (NZZ) as a freelancer. Since then he has travelled all continents. Between 2000 and 2012 Iten was a senior editor at the international desk of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Iten holds a PhD in economics of the University of Zürich (1979) with a thesis titled «Economic pressure on a Traditional Society. A case study of the South-Eastern Nuba in modern Sudan» (Lang Publishers, Berne/Frankfurt), for which he spent one year doing fieldwork. Travelling the Sudan for over a dozen times, he published several books on the country. His most recent visit to the Nuba Mountains in war torn Sudan was in 2006. When in 2012 he discovered from satellite photos that the village of Fungor, where he had based his field study in the 1970s, was burned down, he tried unsuccessfully to investigate the genocidal crime.
Writing on indigenous affairs continues to be one of his topics, which resulted also in various books. In 1986 he exposed the story of the Tasaday cave dwellers in the Philippines as a hoax orchestrated by a Marcos minister. In 1993 he did a series of articles on West Papua, including a journey to visit the underground Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM). In December 2000 he was imprisoned by Indonesia in Jayapura (West Papua) where he became an eyewitness to deadly torture.
Iten also participated as co-author (with Otto C. Honegger) for various film documentaries for Swiss National Television SRF, among them «Eine Reise nach Nebaj» about the war against the Maya in Guatemala (1980) and «Der Erzbischof ist subversiv» (1979) about archbishop Romero shortly before his assassination in El Salvador.
List of books:
«Schwarzer Sudan». 268 S., 84 Fotos. Neptun-Verlag, Kreuzlingen und Welsermühl, München, 1978. An illustrated book on the peoples of Sudan.
«Economic Pressure on a Traditional Society». Peter Lang Verlag, Bern/Frankfurt, 1979. Thesis.
«Fungor - Ein Nuba-Dorf wird ruiniert». 204 S., 36 Fotos. Ullstein, Berlin 1983. A paperback recounting a year’s life in a Nuba village and the start of Muslim fundamentalists attacks.
«Sudan». 148 S., 95 Fotos. Silva-Verlag, Zürich, 1983. An illustrated book.
«Yanomami». Mitherausgeber (Helbig, Iten, Schiltknecht), Pinguin, Innsbruck, 1989. Alarming the world on the gold rush in Brazil.
«Keine Gnade für die Indianer». 17 Reportagen. 254 S., 120 Fotos. Verlag NZZ, Zürich und Campus, Frankfurt 1992. An account of the state of the indigenous populations on the American continent 500 years after Columbus.
«Zwischen allen Welten. Völker am Rande der Zivilisation». 18 Reportagen. Verlag NZZ, Zürich 1995. The life of various African and Asian indigenous peoples, including the Papua.
«Bagdad Google». The war in Iraq and how a German woman found her long lost father in Iraq. Verlag NZZ, Zürich 2004
List of distinctions:
Nikon International Photo Contest, 2nd prize (1974).
Nikon International Photo Contest, 3rd prize (1975).
Eidgenössisches Stipendium für Angewandte Kunst (1975).
Honorary Member Society for the Protection of Threatened Peoples (GfbV).
Roster of Heroes of the Philippine Revolution (1986).
Prize of the Jubilee Foundation of the Union Bank of Switzerland (1998).
Zürcher Journalistenpreis (2001).
also see: oswald-iten.com