The rescuers have found the bodies of three victims since Wednesday but dozens of jade minors are always missing after the collapse of a hill, north of the country.
Le Monde with AFP
The hope of finding survivors is quasi-zero. After a victim found Wednesday following a landslide, a lifeguard informed at the France-Press agency (AFP) that two other bodies were drafted in the morning of Thursday, December 23, in the lake below of the hill that collapsed. One of the victims is a 23-year-old man from the center of the country, hundreds of kilometers away.
Dozens of jade minors are missing after this landslide in HPakant, north of Burma, near the Chinese border, in this high place of jade extraction.
Rescuers who search the lake and the rubble in search of survivors first declared that at least 70 people were missing, before they were always trying to confirm this number.
“It rained last night, the cliff of the discharge could be cracked, so we will not be able to start when the sun will rise and that the fog will dissipate,” said Ko Jack, of the organization of backup Burmese. Ko Nyi, another rescuer, said the temperature of the water at dawn was too cold for the divers to penetrate. “If the corpses do not float today, they will appear the following days, it’s nature,” he added.
A lucrative but unregulated trade
According to a local activist, hundreds of workers returned to HPakant during the rainy season to prospect in the open mines, despite the prohibition imposed by the junta until March 2022. The increased pressure exerted by the Weight of the earth and spilled rocks trained the bottom of the hill towards the nearby lake, explained a lifeguard.
Dozens of people die each year by working in jade lucrative but poorly regulated trading, where poorly paid migrant workers extract very coveted precious stones in China.
The jade and other abundant natural resources in northern Burma, including wood, gold and amber, have helped to finance the two camps of a civil war that has lasted for decades between the decades between Insurgents of Kachin Ethnicity and the military. Civilians are often trapped in the fight for mining control and lucrative revenues, while drug and arms trafficking further aggravates the conflict.
High monsoon rains caused the worst drama of this nature in 2020 with 300 embedded minors after a land slide in the same hpakant massif. The Jade Trade generates more than $ 30 billion a year, nearly half the gross domestic product of Burma.