(Reuters) – College student Saw Myint Tun traveled hundreds of miles from his home in February to work in the jade mines of northern Myanmar in search of gems that could transform his family’s modest fortune.
Family members pray next to a coffin containing the body of a victim after a landslide at a mining site in Hpakant, Kachin State City, Myanmar, July 4, 2020. REUTERS / Stringer
Instead, they offered funeral prayers for him there on Saturday, lit candles in a plywood coffin and chanted Buddhist sutras for the 21-year-old, one of more than 170 people killed Thursday.
Miners were searching for gemstones in Hpakant, the center of Myanmar’s secret billion-dollar jade industry, when a wave of mud and water crashed over them, burying them under a layer of mud.
More than a dozen miners were cremated in Hpakant on Saturday, while 41 were buried in a mass grave. Seventy-seven were buried on Friday.
Thursday’s disaster, the worst in memory, highlights the dangers of trade, which draws impoverished immigrants from across the country looking to make their fortunes.
It is not uncommon for college students to work in the mines raising pocket money for the next semester. Authorities said the victims were independent jade collectors who scrubbed the tailings, the mining waste, in search of lost stones by larger operators.
Myanmar supplies 90% of the world’s jade, the vast majority exported to neighboring China. Human rights groups say the industry is riddled with abuse. Scores are killed each year.
Like many others who died, Saw Myint Tun was from Rakhine state, his brother-in-law, Hla Shwe Win, told Reuters.
Rakhine, one of the poorest regions in Myanmar, is the state from which more than 730,000 Rohingya were forced to flee to neighboring Bangladesh after a 2017 military offensive that, according to the UN, was carried out with genocidal intent. Myanmar denies having committed genocide.
It is now the site of an escalating war between Arakan army rebels, seeking greater autonomy for the region, and government troops.
Hla Shwe Win said that one of his brothers had died in the disaster, while another was injured.
They had followed him to Hpakant to work in the mines, he said, as the women wept over the coffin before burning it according to Buddhist traditions.
“They came here, counting on me,” he told Reuters, saying there were no words to describe how he felt.
Editing by William Mallard
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