Landslide
Near Jade Mine in Myanmar Kills About 100
By
YANGON, Myanmar — A landslide near a jade mine
in northern Myanmar on Saturday evening killed about 100
people, most of them villagers digging for green stones in a mountain of displaced earth, a
witness and a community leader said Sunday. Many other people were missing.
The landslide occurred in the Kachin State area of Hpakant, said
Brang Seng, a jade businessman, who watched as bodies were pulled from the debris and taken to a
hospital morgue.
“People were crying,” he said. “I’m hearing that more than 100
people died. In some cases, entire families were lost.”
Lamai Gum Ja, a
community leader, said that homes at the base of the mine dump had been flattened.
He estimated that 100 to 200 people were still missing. Search
and rescue teams wearing bright orange uniforms dug through the rubble for survivors
on Sunday.
Kachin, which is about 600 miles north of Yangon, Myanmar’s
biggest city, has some of the highest-quality jade in the world.
The industry generated an estimated $31
billion last year, with most of the wealth going to individuals and companies
tied to Myanmar’s former military rulers, according to Global Witness, an advocacy group focused
on natural resources.
Hpakant, the center of the jade industry,
remains very poor, with bumpy dirt roads, constant electricity blackouts and high rates
of heroin addiction.
After Myanmar’s former military rulers handed
over power to a nominally civilian government five years ago, resulting in the lifting of
many Western sanctions, the already rapid pace of mining turned frenetic. Few scraps of
ground or parts of daily life in Hpakant have been untouched by the fleets of
giant yellow trucks and backhoes that have sliced apart mountains.
In the past year, dozens of small-scale miners
have been maimed or killed while picking through tailing dumps.
“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, the Asia director at Global Witness.
“Their legacy to local people is a dystopian wasteland in which scores of
people at a time are buried alive in landslides,” Mr. Davis said.
Structure
of the lead:
WHO- miners
WHEN-
on Saturday evening
WHAT-
A landslide near a jade mine killed about 100 people
WHY-
most of them villagers digging for green stones in a mountain of displaced
earth
WHERE-
YANGON, Myanmar
HOW-
bodies were pulled from the debris and taken to a hospital morgue
Keywords:
1. displaced 已位移的
2. debris 碎片;殘骸
3. morgue 太平間
4. rubble 碎磚
5. advocacy 提倡
6. blackout 燈火熄滅
7. nominally 名義上地
8. frenetic 狂熱的
9. maim 使殘廢;使不能工作
10. plunder 掠奪;搶劫;竊取;侵吞
11. legacy 遺產
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