Dozens of jade miners were buried Friday in a mass grave after a landslide in northern Myanmar killed over 170, most of them migrant workers seeking their fortune in treacherous open-cast mines near the China border.
Women wept by the open plywood caskets, some marked with just a name, a few with a solitary photo, before the bodies were carried into a huge grave gouged from the red earth by a mechanical digger near the scene of the landslide.The tragedy occurred on Thursday when a hillside collapsed in heavy monsoon rains, sending a deluge of smothering mud over the workers who were scouring the land for fragments of jade.
As photos of the dead circulated on social media Facebook users began to identify workers hundreds of miles from home, leaving moving tributes to friends and family members.Another, from a former miner, affectionately remembered one of the dead for his “kind-heart” and generosity with his food during tough shared times on the mountainside.The bloodied bodies — stripped by the force of the sea of mud which entombed them — were yet to be identified.
They are often from impoverished ethnic minority communities, looking for scraps left behind by big firms.“Many of them are Rakhine,” Phon Graing, a Hpakant township official told AFP, referring to the ethnic group who live hundreds of kilometres away at the other end of the country, and who are among Myanmar’s poorest communities.Police say victims had apparently defied a warning not to work the mines during the monsoon, which loosens the bare hillsides.
It said the landslide should serve as a “wake-up call” for Myanmar’s government led by Aung San Suu Kyi — whose party vowed to reform and stamp out corruption.
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