Singapore digs up the dead
2002-04-21 08:35
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