Vietnamese 'cheated' by mediums
HANOI - In Vietnam, people trying to trace relatives
who went missing during the Vietnam war have
complained that they are being tricked out of
money by fake mediums.
The mediums claim their
powers of
extra-sensory
perception enable them
to locate places where
Vietnamese soldiers
went missing in action.
The mediums say they
can conjure up the
spirits of the dead.
Unscrupulous
But the Vietnam Veterans' Association in Hanoi
says it has received many complaints about
the practice.
It claims the mediums are increasingly
well-organised and utterly unscrupulous.
According to a local
newspaper, one family
was led to a site which
turned out to contain
deliberately hidden
animal bones, rather
than human remains.
Another man was told
his younger brother
had been buried in a
graveyard which, it
turned out, never even
existed.
In other cases, the mediums simply direct
relatives to battlefields, where there was
fierce fighting and where many human remains
are still in the ground.
Families desperate
Families can pay hundreds of dollars for the
spurious information.
The fact that they fall for the mediums' tricks
is a reflection of just how desperate they are
to find their relatives' remains.
Many Vietnamese practise ancestor worship.
It is widely believed that if the location of a
body is not known, then the dead person's
spirit will not find anywhere to settle in the
afterlife.
The American Government is also trying to find
its own troops, which went missing in action.
Each year it spends tens of millions of dollars
on investigations and excavations to locate
the 1,498 Americans still listed as missing in
action in Vietnam.
By Owen Bennett-Jones - BBC News Service - December 8, 2000.
|