Soldiers, police and volunteers pulled body after body from the rubble in northern Myanmar yesterday, as the death toll from a landslide near several jade mines reached at least 113, a local official said, with more than 100 others missing.
The collapse early Saturday in Kachin state’s mining community of Hpakant was the worst such disaster in recent memory.
The corpses were taken to a nearby morgue, where friends and relatives broke down as they identified the victims. Some were buried at a local cemetery and others were cremated.
Photo: Eleven Media Group via AP
However, there were stacks of unidentified bodies wrapped in blue plastic tarps.
Kachin is home to some of the world’s highest-quality jade and the industry generated an estimated US$31 billion last year, with most of the wealth going to individuals and companies tied to Myanmar’s former military rulers, according to Global Witness, a group that investigates misuse of resource revenues.
Hpakant, 950km northeast of Myanmar’s biggest city, Yangon, is the industry’s epicenter.
However, it remains desperately poor, with bumpy dirt roads, constant electricity blackouts and sky-high heroin addiction rates.
The accident occurred at a 60m-high mountain of earth and waste discarded by several mines.
Earlier, officials said the dead were mostly men who were picking through the waste and tailings in search of pieces of jade to sell.
However, officials yesterday said the accident occurred at about 3am, burying more than 70 makeshift huts where the miners slept.
Nilar Myint, a local township administrator, said that by yesterday the death toll had reached 113, with more than 100 others missing.
Bodies continued to be pulled from the debris yesterday.
“It’s not ending. It’s still on going. Local people in town are getting angry, because there are just too many bodies,” she said.
After Myanmar’s former military rulers handed over power to a nominally civilian government five years ago, resulting in the lifting of many Western sanctions, the already rapid pace of mining turned frenetic. No scrap of ground, no part of daily life in Hpakant has been left untouched by the fleets of giant yellow trucks and backhoes that have sliced apart mountains and denuded once-plush landscape.
In the last year, dozens of small-scale miners have been maimed or killed picking through tailing dumps.
“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,” Mike Davis of Global Witness said.
“Their legacy to local people is a dystopian wasteland in which scores of people at a time are buried alive in landslides,” he said.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese