Bodies are exhumed as the living seek more space and some of the grieving turn to cyberspace to bury their dead. Christina Pas reports.

This cemetery is one of the few that remain along the Pham Van Dong Highway that links Ha Noi to Noi Bai International Aiport. Residents who live about 40km north of the historical city of Hoi An have been told to remove their relatives from their graves to make way for tourist development. Many of the rice fields have also gone to housing and industry.

Complaints from neighbouring residents of Ho Chi Minh City’s Binh Hung Hoa public cemetery that their water had been contaminated, resulted in a proposal last August to exhume 95,000 graves for transfer to other cemetaries.
Residents live as close ast 100m to the cemetery’s border and often have no access to clean drinking water. They cook with bottled water if they can afford it.

The transfer of the bodies to new graves further away from the urban sprawl is expected to be completed by 2020.

No burials

There will be no further burials at Binh Hung Hoa cemetery but space has been allocated for urns holding the ashes of the cremated. A trade centre and park are planned for the vacated land.

The transfer of the dead from one cemetery to another provides their families with at least the consolation that their loved ones will finally rest in peace.

But there is no certainty of a final resting place for the dead buried near a new highway linking Hoi An and Da Nang with the white sands of Non Nuoc Beach, known as China Beach during the American War.

This historic cemetery on the East Sea is to be bulldozed to make room for a tourist resort.

There will be no resting place at all for many of the bodies saved from the bulldozer as many families cannot afford to have them buried in either a public or private cemetery. For them, cremation is the only choice.

The lack of space for the dead in Viet Nam’s public cemeteries has led to flourishing private graveyards in rice fields outside Ho Chi Minh City.

The increase in the number of unregulated private cemeteries is attributed to the low agricultural land versus the extremely high costs of burying loved ones in regulated cemetaries.

The establishment of private cemeteries outside Ho Chi Minh City has opened up an additional 1,100ha of burial ground, a necessary space in a city where an estimated 100 people die each day and less than a third are cremated.

The cost of a burial plot in a public graveyard such as the 7.5-hectare Da Phuoc cemetery has increased with the rising price of residential and commercial land in Ho Chi Minh City.

A site at this public cemetery costs between VND10 million and VND25 million while the cost at a private cemetery is about VND5 million.

The last wish of Viet Kieu, or overseas Vietnamese, to be buried in their homeland has also contributed to the increasing number of unregulated private cemeteries, the rising demand for plots and to the extravagant monuments erected in their name at both public and private cemeteries.

Haphazard

The haphazard establishment of private cemeteries and the shortage of land to bury the dead prompted the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs to prepare guidelines for the erection of monuments and gravestones, including inscriptions, for submission to the government in December 2007.

The guidelines were to include the reburial and establishment of a database for Vietnamese soldiers. Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung issued a decree that enacted the guidelines in March last year.

VietNamNet/Southeast Asian Times