Burial for hundreds of unknown tsunami dead
Pastor Dale Morgan
Burial for hundreds of unknown tsunami dead*
By Sebastien Berger in Bangmuang
Last Updated: 3:15am GMT 07/12/2006
To the quiet sounds of Buddhist, Muslim and Christian rites for the
unknown dead, Thailand yesterday began burying the last unidentified
bodies and sets of remains left unrecognisable by the 2004 Boxing Day
tsunami.
Mass burial in Thailand
More than 100 nameless victims of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami were
buried yesterday
Only around 20 police officers and religious representatives attended
the ceremony at the Tsunami Victim Cemetery in Bangmuang, which is
dominated by a grey sculpture of a triple wave.
The move symbolises the Andaman coast's efforts to move on two years
after the deluge swept the area, triggered by the world's biggest
earthquake in four decades.
Almost 6,000 corpses were recovered in the aftermath, and a vast victim
identification effort, involving police from scores of countries, has
since put names to 3,273 victims, matching dental records, DNA, and
fingerprints from the remains with samples gathered from relatives or
the homes of the missing.
But another 422 sets of remains could not be identified, and the Thai
authorities have decided that with little new evidence the time has come
for burial.
Of 151 British fatalities all but five have been identified, with only
one located this year. The Foreign Office said they were aware of the
burials and had not raised any concerns about them.
Each microchipped victim, already in a bodybag, was placed inside an
aluminium coffin and laid in an individual concrete vault.
The simple, identical concrete markers at the complex, where the first
300 of the unknown victims had already been buried, are reminiscent of
war grave headstones. None of them bears a name and instead each tomb
simply carries the plot number and an eight-character code that gives no
indication of age, sex or race.
Police Major Teerapol Prachaiyo, 33, said if any of the interred bodies
were subsequently identified they would be exhumed.
Most of the bodies are probably those of Thai and Burmese migrant
workers whose families have not come forward. For those relatives whose
samples have not matched any of the bodies, the likelihood is that their
loved ones have no grave but the sea.
Meanwhile, the remains of some 100 bodies which have been identified but
not collected, will remain in cold storage at minus 15C.
The timing, shortly before the second anniversary of the disaster and
the high tourist season in Thailand, is not entirely co-incidental. Mr
Teerapol said: "The former government thought keeping the bodies in the
containers would scare the tourists."
In Phang Nga province, which includes the Khao Lak coast where most of
the victims in Thailand were killed, the hotel occupancy rates are
running at around 50 per cent, compared with 80 per cent before the tsunami.
Nonetheless some local families are unhappy with the decision.
Sumontha Chan-Ngoen, 20, from Nam Khem, whose mother is still missing,
said: "We are Buddhists and burial is not the Buddhist way to pay
respect to the dead. It's hard to accept."
There were approximately 250,000 victims dead and missing in the tsunami.