Hunt for victims as new landslide hits Myanmar

RESCUERS are searching for workers feared buried in the second landslide in a month in a jade-mining area in northern Myanmar.

The landslide happened on Christmas Day in Kachin state, the war-torn region that is the epicentre of Myanmar’s secretive billion-dollar jade industry.

“We are searching for bodies, but we can’t tell the numbers yet,” said Nilar Myint, an official of the Hpakant district administrative office.

Mechanical diggers are being used to search through the huge pile of mud and rock that slid down a steep hill.

One source said that up to 50 workers could be missing.

But a second Hpakant official, Myo Thet Aung, said officials in villages in the area had reported that only three or four people were known to be missing.

Officials said yesterday that by mid-afternoon they had still not found any bodies.

This area was hit by a massive landslide last month, when more than 100 people were killed.

Locals said that dozens of others had been killed during the year in smaller accidents.

The region is remote, with little phone coverage and poor roads, making it hard to get accurate information quickly after such incidents.

Landslide victims are usually the itinerant workers who scratch out a living picking through piles of waste left by large-scale mining in the hope of finding overlooked pieces of jade that can deliver them from poverty.

Myanmar is the source of nearly all of the world’s finest jadeite, a near-translucent green stone that is greatly prized in neighbouring China, where it is known as the “stone of heaven”.

The Hpakant landscape has been turned into a moonscape of environmental destruction as mining groups use ever-larger diggers to claw the precious stone from the ground.

While these groups — many linked to the juntaera military elite — are thought to be raking in huge sums, local people complain that they are kept out of sharing the bounty. — AFP