A landslide has occurred in the jade mines of northern Burma. The bodies of 113 miners were extracted from the mud, the Kachin State Fire Department announced on Thursday.
The search had to be suspended due to torrential rain, local police said. "The miners were swept away by a torrent of mud caused by heavy showers" of monsoon. "So far we have found a total of 113 bodies," wrote the firefighters on their official Facebook page.
Dangerous work
On this page, photos show a team of rescuers wading in a valley submerged by the mudslide, in the canton of Hpakant, near the Chinese border. Each year, dozens of miners in search of precious stones are killed in accidents due to perilous working conditions, particularly during the monsoon season.
Highly prosperous but unregulated, the mining industry employs many undeclared workers and weighs tens of billions of dollars, according to the NGO Watchdog Global Witness. The open jade mines of Hpakant transformed this remote region into a vast terrain evoking a lunar landscape.
Fatal landslides in the region are frequent, and the victims are often from disadvantaged ethnic communities who operate almost clandestinely in old abandoned mines. Abundant natural resources in northern Burma - including jade, precious wood, gold and amber - help finance both sides of a decades-long civil war between insurgents of the Kachin ethnicity and the Burmese military.
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