Bodies will no longer be buried at Dili’s Santa Cruz or Bidau Santana cemeteries as they are both at full capacity.
Cemetery supervisor Domingos Caldeira Martins said a new cemetery was opened at Becusse-Becora in August.
Neither adults nor children will be buried at the Santa Cruz or Bidau cemeteries, he said.
Martins said the prohibition came directly from Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao at the opening ceremony for the new cemetery.
The Prime Minister said people would be permitted to exhume their relatives’ bodies from the closed cemeteries.
Dili administrator Gaspar Soares said interments had also ceased at the Bedois cemetery.
Soares said the government had appointed undertakers to the Becusse cemetery to take charge of burials. Family members could assist, he said.
Regulations have been imposed at the Becusse cemetery to ensure uniformity of graves.
Headstones must not be higher than 50 centimetres while graves must measure two metres long by 80 centimetres wide and 1.5 metres deep.
The new facility is open from 8am to 6pm daily.
Dili resident Felisberto da Silva supported the cessations of burials at Santa Cruz.
He said the cemetery was historically significant as the site of the infamous Santa Cruz massacre in which scores of Timorese independence supporters were murdered by the Indonesian military.
“For this reason we should respect this site as a historic site for our new generation,” he said.
