Families call for return of war victims' bodies

(File)
(File)

Australia has welcomed home the bodies of 33 soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.

For almost 50 years they rested in cemeteries in Malaysia and Singapore until their families requested they be repatriated -- and today, those Australian soldiers finally returned to familiar shores.

But there was no plane home for their 36 Kiwi brothers-in-arms who remain buried in Asia, thousands of kilometres from loved ones like Marina Hapeta, whose husband Johhny was killed in 1969.

She's never been able to afford to see his grave. "Whoever suffered the most? My boys did. They need a father and it's wrong," she says.

"It matters if they can just walk up to the grave, sit down, and have a chat."

Patricia Tie is another war widow. She's purchased a Wellington cemetery plot for her husband in the hope that one day she can be buried with him.

"I went over there with four little children and came home without their father. We'd only been three weeks when the crash happened. I feel I have been cheated," she says.

But our Government refuses to follow Australia's example.

"At this stage we are not changing the position that we have held, and New Zealand has held, for a very long time," says MP Craig Foss.

"The policies at that time were that people were buried close to the area of conflict or wherever it might be."

However families are worried the cemeteries lack the full protection of Commonwealth war graves, and the Government is unable to guarantee that those graves will never be moved by Malaysia.

"I can't give the guarantee but the expectation with the respect they have shown looking after our fallen continues into the future," says Mr Foss.

The Government says 29,000 Kiwi personnel are buried overseas and it would be unfair to only return those in southeast Asia -- but that's a policy offering little comfort to people like Ms Tie and Ms Hapeta.

Newshub.