Mine landslide spotlights the grim dangers of Myanmar's jade trade

Myanmar’s controversial jade trade faces renewed criticism after a deadly landslide roared through the mining community of Hpakant in restive Kachin state on Saturday. The accident, triggered by the collapse of a 200-foot mountain of debris piled high by industrial machinery, is the worst of its kind in the nation’s recent history. Rescue crews pulled 113 bodies from the rubble. As of Monday, at least 100 people remained missing.

Officials in Myanmar, also known as Burma, said the accident occurred before dawn, wiping out 70 rickety huts while miners slept inside.

“We just don’t know how many people exactly were buried since we don’t have any data on people living there,” said Tin Swe Myint, head of the Hpakant Township Administration Department. “It was just a slum with these … workers living in makeshift tents.”

Hpakant is a shanty town at the epicenter of Myanmar’s booming jade industry, populated by independent miners scavenging for discarded jade shards. The community is desperately impoverished, with dirt roads, sporadic electricity, and sky-high heroin addiction rates. Driven to the drug by exhaustion from their work, many miners believe heroin increases stamina, allowing them to work day and night without breaking. Most of Hpakant’s independent miners earn about $1 an hour.

Myanmar’s jade trade generated about $31 billion last year, accounting for nearly half the nation’s GDP. The industry is largely controlled by the Burmese army, and little profit makes it past the junta to benefit individual states and ordinary miners.

“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, a group that investigates misuse of resource revenues.

“Their legacy to local people is a dystopian wasteland in which scores of people at a time are buried alive in landslides,” he added.

It is believed the majority of Myanmar’s jade is smuggled into bordering China. According to a recent Guardian report, a jade necklace at a Hong Kong auction last year fetched nearly $27 million. The Chinese prize the stone as a symbol of grace, beauty, and purity.

Last month, Global Witness released a 128-page report slamming Myanmar’s mining industry with accusations of large-scale corruption.

“Myanmar’s jade business may be the biggest natural resource heist in modern history,” said Global Witness analyst Juman Kubba.

In 2001, Myanmar’s military relinquished power to a nominally civilian government, dissolving many Western-imposed labor agreements. That resulted in a mining frenzy, with nearly every shred of the once-plush, mountainous Kachin landscape denuded and ripped apart by fleets of yellow backhoes.

Kachin is religiously unique in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, with close to 40 percent of the state’s population claiming Christianity, the legacy of 19th century Baptist missionaries such as Adoniram Judson.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.