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Singapore digs up the dead

2002-04-21 08:35
line

Singapore - LF Yong starts digging bodies just after dawn. On an average day, Yong and his team of 20 workers will have cracked open 40 graves and emptied them of their bones by noon.

Yong is responsible for the hands-on work behind a government project to clear the Bidadari Cemetery, one of the largest Christian burial plots in Southeast Asia. The project will convert the tranquil resting ground for 58 000 dead into 12 000 centrally located, high-rise apartments for the living.

The project is fueled by crowded Singapore's hunger for land. The tiny Southeast Asian island, nestled between Malaysia and Indonesia, covers 650km² and has 4 million residents.

By contrast, the 65 000 people of Andorra in Europe's Pyrenees live on 468km² and even Manhattan's 1.5 million citizens have 787km² to inhabit.

In Singapore, government housing, highways and rapid transit lines have been creeping ever closer to the Bidadari cemetery and will take over within 10 years when the apartments and a new subway station are completed.

For now, the oasis of frangipani trees and rolling hills remains peaceful. Rows of gravestones and marble statues are spread over 26 hectares, their epitaphs engraved in a dozen different languages including Chinese, English, Portuguese, Japanese and Hindi. The word Bidadari itself comes from "widyadari", a type of Hindu nymph.

Muslim bodies also exhumed

Over the past two decades, the government has exhumed more than 36 cemeteries of different races and religions. Bidadari, one of the largest such projects, contains the remains of 58 000 Christians buried between 1907 and 1972, with most interred before 1951.

Another 68 000 bodies will be exhumed from a neighbouring Muslim section and reburied elsewhere.

All unclaimed Christian bodies will be cremated by the government and, unless the ashes are claimed within a year, they will be scattered at sea. Christian families that want to rebury exhumed remains must pay for it. But the government is reburying bodies from faiths that ban cremation.

Since March 2001, Singapore has published numerous notices about the exhumation in newspapers here and in Australia, England and Malaysia, but only 9 449 bodies have been claimed. The remaining 48 551 bodies will be cremated.

Once the claimed bodies have all been exhumed, Yong's team will start digging up and cremating the unclaimed, said Sum Foong Yee, a spokesperson for Singapore's Housing and Development Board which is overseeing the project.

About 10% of those buried here are expatriates, businessmen from the colonial era, missionaries or casualties of war.

Others are sailors, such as Augustine Podmore Williams, the Englishman thought to be the inspiration for Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim.

Unlike most, Williams' small headstone will not be lost when the cemetery is razed. His is one of a handful of markers deemed "historically significant" by Singapore's National Heritage Board that will be put in a memorial garden, along with an ornate iron gate from Bidadari. - Sapa-AP

- SAPA

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