Rescuers in northern Myanmar yesterday said they were confident that only a handful of people are missing after a jade mine landslide, rejecting local reports that as many as 50 might have been buried.
A wall of rocks, mud and debris careered down a hillside on Friday afternoon in Hpakant, Kachin State — the wartorn area that is the epicenter of Myanmar’s secretive billion-dollar jade industry.
More than 100 people were killed in the same area in a landslide last month and locals feared dozens of workers might be buried in the latest accident.
However, officials involved in the rescue said they had only been notified of a handful of missing people and have yet to recover any bodies.
“Three men have been reported to us as missing,” a duty police officer in Hpakant said, asking not to be named. “We are not sure whether they were buried in the dump because we have not found any bodies yet.”
The state-run Global New Light of Myanmar yesterday reported the same figures.
“Relatives of the three people informed us that three people have not yet returned home since the accident happened,” the paper quoted Hpakant Township Administration Office head Tin Swe Myint as saying.
He added that the landslide took place after most workers had finished work and unlike last month’s tragedy had not engulfed a row of shanty houses.
However, a second police officer warned it was still too early to say how many people have been caught up in the landslide.
“We have no idea how many might be buried there,” local officer Thet Zaw Oo said.
Myanmar’s shadowy and poorly regulated jade trade is enormously dangerous with landslides a frighteningly common hazard.
Those killed 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 an overlooked 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 neighboring 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 large diggers to claw the precious stone from the ground.
However, 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 off from the bounty.
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