Yangon | A landslide has left at least 1 dead and dozens of people missing in northern Burma in a jade mine, a very lucrative but opaque and poorly regulated industry where working conditions are very dangerous.
“About 70 to 100 people are missing in a landslide that occurred around 4 am” in a jade mine in Hpakant, Kayah state, rescuer Ko Ny told AFP.
“We sent 25 wounded to hospital while we found one dead,” he added.
About 200 rescuers are participating in the search, some aboard boats to try to recover bodies from a lake, he added.
The Kachin News newspaper announced that twenty miners were killed in the landslide.
According to the fire department, firefighters from Hpakant and the neighboring town of Lone Khin were participating in the rescue operations, but they did not communicate any results.
In Burma, dozens of miners die each year working in hazardous conditions in jade quarries, an opaque and poorly regulated industry.
Landslides are frequent in this poor and difficult to access region, which looks like a lunar landscape as it has been altered by large mining groups, with no regard for the environment.
Following a moratorium in 2016, many large mines closed and are no longer monitored, allowing the return of many independent miners. Coming from underprivileged ethnic communities, the latter operate almost clandestinely in sites abandoned by the excavators.
Heavy monsoon rains caused the worst disaster of its kind in 2020, with 300 miners buried after a landslide in the Hpakant massif, the heart of this industry, near the Chinese border.
Opaque and poorly regulated
The jade trade generates more than $ 30 billion a year, almost half of the country’s Gross Domestic Product.
A very small part of this financial windfall ends up in the Burmese state coffers, most of the quality jade being smuggled into China where the demand for this stone, supposed to symbolize prosperity, seems insatiable.
On the other hand, this trade drains fortunes for the military who have controlled access to the Hpakant region since the early 1990s and hold numerous mining concessions.
Another key player: the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), a rebel faction that has been fighting for decades with the military for control of mines and the income they generate.
In the end, everyone receives bribes and the jade finances many conflicts between military and ethnic groups in the region and even beyond.
The February coup destroyed any chance of securing the sector reform initiated under Aung San Suu Kyi, watchdog Global Witness said in a report released in 2021.