Myanmar set to bury dozens more jade miners
>>NAY PYI TAW: Dozens more jade miners killed in a landslide in northern Myanmar were set to be buried yesterday, a local official said, after 77 others were interred in a mass grave on Friday following one of the worst mining accidents in the country’s history.
More than 170 people, many of them migrants seeking their fortune in the jade-rich Hpakant area of Kachin State, died on Thursday after mining waste collapsed into a lake, triggering a surge of mud and water.
The miners were collecting stones in Hpakant — the centre of Myanmar’s secretive billion-dollar jade industry — when the wave crashed onto them, entombing them under a layer of mud.
Thar Lin Maung, a local official from the information ministry, told Reuters by phone yesterday 171 bodies had been pulled out but more were continuing to float to the surface.
He said the 77 buried on Friday had been identified and 39 would be interred yesterday. Volunteers carried plywood coffins and placed them into a mass grave carved out by diggers close to the mine site.
Many other bodies, battered and stripped of their clothing by the force of the wave that hit them, still have not been identified.
Police say victims had apparently defied a warning not to work the mines during the monsoon, which loosens the bare hillsides.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply saddened” by the deaths, as environmental groups called for an end to an illegal trade dynamised by Chinese demand.
Myanmar supplies 90% of the world’s jade, the vast majority of which is exported to neighbouring China, which borders Kachin State. Deadly landslides and other accidents are common in the mines, which draw impoverished workers from across Myanmar.
About 100 people were killed in a 2015 collapse that led to calls to regulate the industry. Another 50 died in 2019. But Thursday’s landslide was the worst in memory.
The country’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, on Friday blamed the disaster on joblessness in the country, lamenting in a Facebook Live broadcast that informal workers had to go to the mines for lack of other employment.
The government announced the formation of a committee to investigate the disaster.
However, activists say little has changed in the industry despite a pledge from Ms Suu Kyi’s government to clean it up when she took power.
Rights group Global Witness said in a statement the landslide was a “damning indictment of the government’s failure to curb reckless and irresponsible mining practices”.
“Neither a promised new Gemstone law, passed by parliament in 2019, nor a Gemstone policy that has been in production for several years have yet been implemented,” the statement said.