Minzayar Oo wins the First Prize of the Festival Yangon Photo 2016 in the professional category with his series « The Curse of Jade ».
Myanmar’s secretive jade mines lie in the Kachin town of Hpakant, which is located in the northern part of the country. Hpakant, also known as “the land of jade”, produces the world’s highest quality of the stone, which neighboring China has prized for millennia for its beauty and symbolism. As an old Chinese saying states – “Gold is valuable but jade is priceless”. Everyday in Hpakant, hundreds of thousands of young men migrate from different regions of Myanmar with the dream of finding a shortcut to wealth. They swarm across mountains of mining waste dumped by government licensed mining companies, seeking fortune. It is a perilous job especially when banks and slag heaps are destabilized by monsoon rain. A massive landslide in November 2015 at a government-licensed company waste-dumping site reportedly killed 114 people.
Drug use is intrinsic to jade mining as ‘shooting galleries’ operate openly in Hpakant with workers often exchanging lumps of jade for hits of heroine. Armed conflict in the area also flared up again in mid-2012 leading to ambushes along the jade trading road, which is often lined with land mines, remnants of decades of civil war. Lumps of the precious stone can represent a fortune for small-time prospectors, sometimes a handful of jade being worth millions of dollars. But rare finds pale next to the staggering wealth extracted from this billion-dollar industry by Myanmar’s military, the tycoons it helps enrich, and the firms linked to China where most of the jade end up illegally. A recent report by London-based NGO Global Witness put the size of Myanmar’s jade industry at $31 billion in 2014, equating it to nearly half of the national GDP and over 46 times the nation’s spending on healthcare. “Myanmar’s jade business may be the biggest natural resource heist in modern history,” says Global Witness analyst Juman Kubba.
INFORMATION
8th Festival Photo de Yangon
March 12 – 31, 2016
340, Pyay Road, Sanchaung Township
Yangon, Myanmar
http://www.yangonphoto.com
http://www.minzayar.com
http://www.facebook.com/yangonphotofestival
