Myanmar landslide leaves 100 dead

YANGON, Sunday

About 100 people have died in a huge landslide in a remote mining area of northern Myanmar, officials said on Sunday, as search teams continued to find bodies in one of the deadliest disasters to strike the country’s shadowy jade industry.

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 firms at the centre 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 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 region.

“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 shows men carrying several bodies slung in blankets watched by a crowd in a dusty plain near Sai Tung Village. 

Nilar Myint, an official from the local administrative authorities in Hpakant, said rescue teams had so far found 97 bodies.

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 bodies,” said Nilar Myint.

UNIDENTIFIED MIGRANT MINERS

She added that because the men were mostly migrant workers, authorities were struggling to identify those killed.

“The victims’ families live elsewhere. They only live and work in this area but they come from many 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 neighbouring 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 alone as local people say the mining firms, many of which are linked to the country’s junta-era military elite, scale up their operations.

But this appears to be the largest such accident in the secluded region. 

In an October report, advocacy group, Global Witness, estimated that the value of Myanmar jade produced in 2014 was $31 billion, the equivalent of nearly half the country’s GDP.

But that figure is around 10 times the official $3.4 billion sales of the precious stone, in an industry that has long been shrouded in secrecy with much of the best jade thought to be smuggled to China. ()