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Landslide kills 100 at jade mining area in Myanmar
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AROUND 100 people have died in a huge landslide in a remote jade mining area of northern Myanmar, officials said yesterday, as search teams continued to find bodies in one of the deadliest disasters to strike the country’s shadowy jade industry. Many more people were missing.
Those killed were thought to have been mainly itinerant miners, who scratch a living scavenging through mountains of waste rubble dumped by mechanical diggers used by mining firms at the center of a secretive multi-billion dollar jade industry in war-torn Kachin state.
Saturday’s massive landslide crushed dozens of flimsy shanty huts clustered on the barren landscape, home to an unknown number of people.
The disaster happened at about 3.30am local time and lasted just a couple of minutes, according to Zaw Moe Htet, a small scale local gems trader whose village overlooks the devastated area in the Hpakant mining area.
“Even people living in villages further away could hear the cries of those who rushed to the scene,” he said.
Video footage of the area shot on Saturday shows men carrying several bodies slung in blankets watched by a crowd of local people in a dusty plain near the village of Sai Tung.
Nilar Myint, an official from the administrative authorities in Hpakant, said that rescue teams have so far found 97 people killed in the landslide.
Rescue operations continue with the Myanmar Red Cross, army, police and local community groups, but officials say they have little hope of pulling people alive from the rubble.
“We are seeing only dead bodies,” said Nilar Myint.
She added that because the men were mostly migrant workers, authorities were struggling to identify any of those killed.
“The victims’ families live elsewhere. They only live and work in this area but they come from many different places,” she said.
Myanmar is the source of virtually all of the world’s finest jadeite, a near-translucent green stone that is prized above almost all other materials in neighboring China.
Landslides are a common hazard in Hpakant as prospectors pick their way across perilous mounds, often under cover of darkness, driven by the hope that they might find a chunk of jade that would deliver them from poverty.
Scores have been killed this year as local people say the mining firms, many of which are linked to the country’s junta-era military elite, scale up their operations in Kachin.
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