Could I steal a stone earlobe from Easter Island? In a second...

Just under a year ago, Urban Dirt was cruising past a smallish structure outside the drowsy metropolis of Hanga Roa. The tiny fortress, which looked not totally unlike the spartan “honeymoon suite”  of our hotel, turned out to be the central penitentiary of Easter Island.
Now, given that the entire population of Easter Island is only 4,000, and everybody seems to know everybody else (or indeed, is related to them), the status of inmate at this diddy prison is really pretty special. The longest-serving (lone) lag, our guide informed us, is a multiple rapist. A bad man, she declared gravely...

But there is now a chance this unsavoury character will have some company in his little prison. A Finnish chap, called Marko Kulju, who might be joining the local sex-criminal for a seven-year stretch. His attempted crime – described by visibly panicking Finnish diplomats as “crazy and impulsive” - could very well rate as the crudest bit of plastic surgery since the invention of the guillotine.

You see, Mad Marko (26) is under arrest for allegedly tearing the earlobe off a Moai – the colossal stone heads that have lived on Easter Island for centuries and are, let me tell you, the most astonishing creations imaginable. Forget Aku Aku, the persistent “mystery” cobblers that surround the Moai, all that nonsense about UFOs and alien demi-gods, and even Jared Diamond’s magnificent chapter in Collapse.The narrative, no matter how beautifully or scientifically rendered, is utterly redundant when you stand before the real thing.

I do not support or condone Mad Marko’s lunatic lunge for the lug (particularly since it ended up smashed to pieces), but every atom in by body screams in sympathy with his sudden and uncontrollable lust for that stone ear. You just have to go there to understand it.
But there was something decidedly odd in the pathetic pleas for calm by the Finnish consul in Chile (of which Easter Island is a dependency). As well as the somewhat excessive assertion that Mad Marko “really, really regrets” his action (again, I don’t think for a second that he does) Patricia Loflund defended her countryman by saying that he was “surprised that it has caused such a stir”.
Now that, sunshine, is absolute tosh.

These stone heads, sitting serenely thousands of miles from civilisation on a pimple in the Pacific are all about “causing a stir”. That is what they have always done, and that is very probably what they will always do. It is in their stone DNA. These things destroyed a civilisation and have enraptured and baffled archaeologists for years. To imagine that you could pinch an ear without causing a stir means Mad Marko will almost certainly be let off on an insanity plea.
Indeed, their power to cause a stir remains impressive. The important thing to remember about the 400 Moai on Easter Island, is that they were originally meant to be standing upright on their Ahu plinths. Every single one of them was then torn down a few centuries ago – supposedly a fit of collective island madness - and many of them were shattered in the fall. About 50 have been re-erected, mostly using cranes provided by a Japanese company.

Now, when Urban Dirt was on Easter Island, the guide told us that Tadano (the Japanese company that  originally provided the cranes back in the early 1990s) was about to supply another crane so that more of the Moai could be restored to their upright positions on the Ahus where they belonged. Interesting, I thought, and when I got back to Tokyo I called the chaps at Tadano to ask about the project.
To my surprise, they were extremely hostile. They were sorry, but they simply were not going to talk about Easter Island to a journalist from The Times. Not after THAT article…
A trawl in the archives, and I can kind of see their point. The article the Tadano boys were referring to was a 1992 op-ed piece by the late, great Bernard Levin, who visited Easter Island in 1989 and wrote a particularly brilliant article. Three years later, however, his op-ed piece took a rather more aggressive tone and cursed Tadano and the Japanese as “grave robbers”, “nose pokers” and “pestilent trespassers” for daring to help re-erect the Moai.
Now a member of that small but happy cabal of people who have visited Easter Island, I believe Levin’s article is wrong in almost every respect. And I reach that conclusion because, as I think back to my happy stay on “the navel of the world”, I remember my profound disgust at watching a herd of cows pissing all over a fallen Moai. Sure, Levin rants on about the sacrilege of lifting these stone creatures from the mud and Japan’s vile lack of reverence for the past, but he is missing the point. Cow urine, lichen and other air-borne pollutants are destroying the heads. Putting them upright and coating them in a chemical that prevents further erosion will put an end to that.
“…and when they have tidily given them a good scraping and a final polish – do you think, then, that there will be any room for awe on Easter Island?” bellows Levin in full righteous mode.
Well yes. Yes there will still be awe. Considerably more awe than for the future visitor of Levin’s preferred Easter Island, who arrives to find most of the Moai a foetid heap of dissolved pumice and cow piss. You see, the Japanese and Chilean governments chose to ignore Levin’s 1992 polemic and have instead re-erected several dozen of the heads. Is there awe on Easter Island? Well, more than enough to turn a Finn into an earlobe thief….

Comments

[EG]

Just a technical comment: Easter Island is not a "dependency" of Chile. It is a bona fide Chilean province.

[Vicky B]

He should be punished - perhaps he should be made to put some of the fallen ones upright!

[José Luis, Spain]

Well ... What will be your oppinion if a brown chilean catholic tourist steal a piece of stone decoration inside of one english rural-church which is pissed outside by teenagers every weekend?

It's the same. La Isla de Pascua or Eastern Island it´s not "our" island. We pay conservation, but no rights or vandalist acts.

[DAN R, UK]

Still, 7 years of his life?

A bit extreme perhaps?

[Pauli Ojala]

There were more column meters published on the death of Princess Diana than there were on the invasion at Normandy. Soon there will be more column meters on this earlobe of the moai statute (1 out of 400-1000, the hungry media does not even know the number) than there are columns on the massive Buddha statutes annihilated by the Taleban regime.

This countryman of mine has been lynched high. Ear off. 7 years in a South American prison. After this publicity, even a day in a South American jail would kill him.

And as I read the actual story behind the News from Congoo to Australia, it seems to me that he's not proven to break it by purpose.

A high-octan, adrenaline addict adventurer climbs on a top of a high and sacred monument. Bad enough. The Finn brokes the ear of this fragile lava type of stone. Worse enough. My countryman tries to hide it and runs away. Worst enough. (OK, Oll Korrect, he confessed what happened later on.) But this does not prove him a thief though the whole globe would shout and shoot so!

It was the Easter week at the Easter Island. The same week the Finnish leaders of the Botnia pulp factory at the border river between Uruguay and Argentine were on trial in a South American court for "Planned damage". After Finnish flags had been burnt in the streets of Argentine for 3 years for this biggest investment ever to the poor country of Uruguay. We have a classical scape goat and red herring here, it appears to me. Not every tattood boxer is suffering from Dementia pugilistica. In Finland we enjoy extreme sports, but the aim was not to vandalize it appears to me. So now we know we should prefer Tibet over the highest 22-meter Moai for climbing. That I want to apologize.

An outrageous mob wanting to lynch a man is an old scene, only the internet phenomenon is new. A raging mob behaves irrationally when it goes out to lynch. 314000 votes, 52% would sentence him to de facto death in South American jail, without knowing whether it was an alleged theft or an accident from climbing.

Few FACTS about Finland
Finland has been the least corrupt country in the world in the transparency international throughout the 3rd millennium: http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2006 . In the OECD's international assessment of student performance, PISA, Finland has consistently been among the highest scorers worldwide; in 2003, Finnish 15-year-olds came first in reading literacy, science, and mathematics; and second in problem solving, worldwide. The World Economic Forum ranks Finland's tertiary education #1 in the world. In 1906, Finland became the first European nation (and one of the first in the world) to grant women the right to vote and run for parliament. Finland's most famous company is Nokia, the world's largest producer of mobile phones. Just 30 years ago, Nokia company was selling mainly tiers, rubber boots and rubber sticks for the police.The most famous Finnish person alive today is Linus Torvalds, who originated (and still maintains) Linux, the shareware free computer operating system which is taking the world by storm and is showing increasing signs of revolutionizing the computer industry (and perhaps other things as well). And a quote: 'If Microsoft, one of these days, will invent something that does not suck, it will probably be a Microsoft vacuum cleaner'.

Pauli Ojala
Finland

Another viewpoint on the topic:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Easter-island-broken-ear-Tintti-ja-sarkynyt-korva.htm