YANGON, MYANMAR—Rescuers were searching through mud and rubble Saturday after a new landslide buried workers in a remote jade mining region in northern Myanmar, the second such incident in just over a month.
The landslide took place on Friday afternoon in Hpakant, Kachin State, the war-torn area that is the epicentre of Myanmar’s secretive billion dollar jade industry.
“The rescue process has now started and we are searching for dead bodies but we can’t tell the numbers yet,” Nilar Myint, an official from Hpakant Administrative Office, told AFP.
Local media reported as many as 50 people might have been buried by the debris.
But a second official involved in the rescue operation downplayed that number.
“According to what officials from nearby villages have told us, just three or four people are missing at the moment,” Myo Htet Aung, also from the Hpakant Administrative Office, told AFP.
“We have not yet found any dead bodies in the process,” he added.
The same area was hit by a massive landslide last month that killed more than 100. Locals says dozens more have died throughout the year in smaller accidents.
The region is remote, with little phone coverage and poor roads making it difficult to obtain precise and swift data after such incidents.
Those killed in landslides are mainly itinerant workers who scratch a living picking through the piles of waste left by large-scale industrial mining firms in the hope of stumbling across a previously missed hunk of jade that will deliver them from poverty.
Myanmar is the source of virtually all of the world’s finest jadeite, a near-translucent green stone that is enormously prized in neighbouring China, where it is known as the “stone of heaven.”
The Hpakant landscape has been turned into a moonscape of environmental destruction as firms use ever-larger diggers to claw the precious stone from the ground.
But while mining firms — many linked to the junta-era military elite —are thought to be raking in huge sums, local people complain they are shut out from the bounty.
In an October report, advocacy group Global Witness estimated that the value ofMyanmar jade produced in 2014 alone was $31 billion, adding the trade might be “biggest natural resource heist in modern history.”
Much of the best jade is thought to be smuggled directly to China.
