Landslide at Burma jade mine kills 100 villagers

A landslide near a jade mine in northern Burma killed 100 people on Saturday, most of them villagers digging for scraps in a mountain of displaced earth. Many more people are missing.

The collapse was in the Kachin state community of Hpakant, said Brang Seng, a jade businessman, who watched as bodies were pulled from the debris and taken to a hospital morgue.

“People were crying,” he said. Boulders and earth ripped down the slopes. “I’m hearing that more than 100 people died. In some cases, entire families were lost.” Lamai Gum Ja, a community leader, said homes at the base of the mine-waste dump were also flattened.

Between 100 and 200 people are missing. Search-and-rescue teams, wearing bright-orange uniforms, combed through the rubble for survivors. Hpakant is 900km north of Rangon, Burma’s biggest city. The region, which borders China, is home to some of the world’s highest-quality jade, bringing in billions of pounds a year, though most of that money goes to individuals and companies tied to Burma’s former military rulers.

Burma only recently began transitioning from a half-century of dictatorship to democracy. Hpakant, the epicentre of the country’s jade boom, remains desperately poor, with bumpy dirt roads and constant electricity blackouts.

Informal miners risk their lives picking through scraps at the giant mines. “Large companies, many of them owned by families of former generals, army companies, cronies and drug lords, are making tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year through their plunder of Hpakant,” said Mike Davis, of Global Witness, which investigates revenue misuse.