Myanmar’s secretive jade industry - run by military elites, drug lords and crony companies - is fuelling armed conflict, land grabs, deadly landslides and floods in northern Kachin state, the rights group Global Witness said on Friday.
Jade is driving conflict between the government and ethnic Kachin rebels, funding both sides in a war that has killed thousands of people and displaced 100,000 since 2011, the London-based organisation said in a 128-page report.
Companies named in the report did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Global Witness analysis valued Myanmar’s jade production in 2014 at as much as $31bn- equivalent to 48% of Myanmar’s GDP - and up to $122bn over the decade through 2014.
Myanmar’s many tariffs include a 20% value-based tax on jade at mine sites and 10% on sales at government jade sales, but Global Witness estimates the state received less than $374m in official jade revenues in 2014 - less than 2% of the $31bn billion estimated output value.
A Mines Ministry official, asked to comment on the report, said his ministry transferred all tax revenue from the mines to the Finance Ministry. “Then the Ministry of Finance would allocate budgets to the states and regions.”
Over the years, tens of thousands of people across the country have come to Kachin state to mine jade but have had slim pickings, illegally combing through company waste.
The mining - which feeds neighbouring China’s appetite for the “stone of heaven” - has left a deadly wasteland. In April 2015, a “torrent of liquid mud” burst through the edge of a crater, engulfing machines and operators, killing between 30 and 60 people, local residents told Global Witness.
Myanmar has recently agreed to ceasefires with several armed ethnic groups, but its conflict with the Kachin Independence Army and Kachin Independence Organisation is its most intractable.
The jade funding both sides in the war creates incentives for military commanders and government hardliners to prolong the conflict and protect assets they could lose if the jade business became more open and fair, the report said.
