The tragedy was all too familiar in Myanmar’s infamous northern jade mining town of Hpakant: In the early hours of the morning, hundreds of jade pickers teetered on the edge of unstable mountains to scavenge the loose debris dumped by trucks. They are convinced finding a valuable stone will forever change their lives. When the mountain collapses miners are instantly enveloped by a wall of mud when a heavy landslide hits the bottom. Dozens instantly disappear and families are left without answers.

This year’s landslide was deadliest on record. The July 2 collapse at the Wai Khar mine left at least 175 dead, mostly men in their 20s, reportedly from as far away as war-ravaged Rakhine state. Last year, at least 50 people died, buried alive by the mountain, and in 2015, 113 died. Each disaster sparked calls for reform of the jade mining sector.

“The tragedy at the Hpakant mines is not due to a natural disaster but is a human-made disaster. The core reason for these deaths is the central government’s poor governance of natural resources and environmental mismanagement and flaws in the extreme centralized quasi-civilian 2008 constitution,” said the Kachin Development Networking Group.

Kachin state’s Hpakant is the epicenter of jade mining and holds 14,000 hectares of the richest deposits in the country. The mine had officially closed down on June 30, but that didn’t prevent unauthorized jade pickers from working the area. Most days, such workers will go home empty handed, or make a few dollars on small stones. If they find big pieces, the company or boss they work for will take the stone and accompanying profits. With little transparency as to how these companies operate, it is close to impossible for victims’ families to receive any form of compensation from the government, or from the company their loved ones “worked” for.

Broken Promises and Scant Oversight

Civil society groups monitoring northern Myanmar have characterized the governing National League for Democracy’s policy response to calls to reform the sector after recurring landslides as worse than under the military junta. After coming to power five years ago, State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD government promised to undertake real reforms, but weak legal frameworks remain and little progress has been made. Suu Kyi instead noted that miners there disregarded that the mine was already closed and said, “most of these victims are illegal miners.” She went on to say that “it is difficult for the country’s citizens to get legal jobs, and that generating jobs should be a priority.”

Myanmar watchers are skeptical that the “investigative body” announced by the government will yield any real results, or that there will be any strengthening of new regulatory measures. Critics fault repeated landslides with significant death tolls as the government’s unwillingness to enforce safety standards and on the mining companies which are allowed to operate in Hpakant.

“Five years after taking office and pledging to reform the corrupt sector, the National League for Democracy has yet to implement desperately needed reforms, allowing deadly mining practices to continue and gambling the lives of vulnerable workers in the country’s jade mines,” London-based environmental watchdog Global Witness said in a statement after the most recent tragedy. “The longer the government waits to introduce rigorous reforms of the jade sector, the more lives will be lost. This was an entirely preventable tragedy that should serve as an urgent wake-up call for the government.”

In 2014, the government of Myanmar joined the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) to increase transparency and accountability in how the country manages its natural resources. This was intended to make a publicly available list of active oil, gas, gemstone and mineral licenses, but much of the data is still incomplete. That same year, it temporarily stopped granting new licenses for a period of two years. Critics say that the Gemstone law, passed in 2019, does not go far enough in restraining the illegal mining business. A separate gemstone policy has yet to be implemented, which has blocked a more viable and long-term approach to mining jade.

Freed from Sanctions, Jade Business Thrives

After almost 20 years of American sanctions on the military junta in power for half a century, the Obama administration decided to change course based on its perception that real political reform was happening in the country. After restoring civilian rule through democratic elections, then-President Obama met with Suu Kyi in September 2016 and announced that all economic sanctions would be lifted.

A month later, after consultation with Suu Kyi, Obama revoked several executive orders related to Myanmar sanctions in December, he ended more restrictions on U.S. aid to the country. Heavily criticized by transparency watchdogs, Obama said in 2016, “It is the right thing to do in order to ensure that the people of Burma [Myanmar] see rewards from a new way of doing business and a new government.”

The lifting of economic sanctions meant that a longstanding prohibition on Myanmar jade imports and companies associated with its operations inside the country would be removed from the U.S. Treasury’s blacklist. Juman Kubba of Global Witness said at the time, “The U.S. government is dropping one of the best sources of leverage over the former generals, drug lords and military companies who still secretly control critical industries like jade.”

Four years later, many are disappointed with the lack of progress made by the NLD and argue that the lifting of sanctions let the military off the hook in terms of accountability.

The Journey from Mine to Market to China

The Hpakant mines are only 100 kilometers from Myitkyina, Kachin state’s main city, but it takes 6-10 hours via extremely rough, unpaved road to get there. Several checkpoints are set up along the way and foreigners are forbidden from entering anywhere close to the mining areas. Although illegal, Chinese buyers have increasingly made their way to the mines to cut out the middlemen. Bribes or “royalties” are paid to military commanders so smugglers are not stopped at checkpoints along the smuggling trail from Hpakant to Myitkyina to Mandalay.

For middleman Shima Verma, from Rakhine state, he and his family have been in the lucrative jade business for years. He says he makes dozens of trips between Hpakant and Mandalay per year and works with Chinese sellers at the market to facilitate deals. For the rocks he sells on average, he explains that the miner gets $60, he will get $150, and the Chinese seller will earn $500. He says he earns $2,000-$3,000 per month, ten times the average wage in Myanmar.

A share also goes to the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), to middlemen, and local bosses, leaving jade pickers 10-20 percent. The lion’s share of the industry, however, is controlled by the former military junta in the country. Although foreign ownership in Myanmar is illegal, the biggest producers are Chinese-owned shell companies from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It is estimated that only 10-15 owners own about 100 large mining companies in the country. The Wai Khar mine is allegedly owned by five different companies. As is often the case, these companies are untraceable and there is little to hold them accountable when an accident happens. Around the whole mining area, these companies are often difficult to identify, are government shell companies with fraudulent licenses, or are financed by Chinese businessmen, sometimes dual nationals. Global Witness said it could be “the biggest natural resource heist in modern history.”

A 2015 report by Global Witness, Jade: Myanmar’s Big State Secret, revealed the inner workings of the multi-billion dollar jade sector valued at $31 Billion. The report revealed an extensive network of untransparent companies tied to the Myanmar military, ethnic rebel groups operating in the area, the drug and arms trade, and Chinese businesses.

According to sellers in Mandalay, thousands come to do business everyday in the largest jade market in the world. In the Mandalay market, sellers connect with Chinese buyers, many from the closest border town of Ruili in Yunnan, China. During the financial crisis, the jade trade slowed down, but by 2011, the thriving Ruili jade industry attracted scores of young people from all over Yunnan to work in the border town, refining stones to be sent to clients all over China. Chinese buyers sit and examine rocks of all sizes from Burmese sellers who are jade pickers themselves, middlemen, or Sino-Burmese businessmen. Some of the jade goes through official channels to Naypyidaw at gem emporiums, but most is smuggled through the black market into China through the nearest border. Only a small fraction of these revenues can be traced and end up being taxed.

Before the pandemic, on the flight back to Mandalay from Myitkyina, I sat next to a Chinese jade trader from Guangzhou who said he had been in Hpakant several times in the last three years. There are direct flights from his city to Mandalay. He said he makes $4,000-$6,000 a month. The Chinese economy amid the coronavirus pandemic has experienced its worst economic slowdown since the 1970s, shrinking almost 7 percent. But the slowdown had already begun before the pandemic. “The economy is getting worse in China,” the man told me. “With the money I make from jade, I can easily buy a house and make a good life for my family. It would take me years to do that in an ordinary job in China.”

Fewer and fewer transactions are done in cash, but now with the prevalence of smartphones and high speed internet in Myanmar, most Chinese sellers hold livestream auctions for buyers online and sell the jade instantly, receiving money by Chinese apps such as WeChat or Taobao. These cashless transactions also mean revenues are harder to trace, with an estimated 80 percent of purchases tax-free. On the Chinese side, Ruili is explicitly referred to in the jade business as the Taobao Jade Market, set up jointly by the Chinese government and e-commerce giant Taobao.

“Gold is valuable, but jade is priceless”

From the Chinese perspective, the symbolism of jade runs millennia deep, traced back to the Neolithic period as a symbol of prosperity among the elite. The jade obsession is almost exclusively Chinese and the demand for the stone is driven almost entirely by the dometic Chinese market. At the top end, the Chinese view the worth of jade more than gold.

Other jadeite deposits exist elsewhere in the world: Guatemala, Japan, Russia, and in the United States’ California, but it is most accessible on China’s doorstep through Yunnan, and Myanmar has the top quality jadeite. A “jade road” between the two countries existed since the end of the 18th century until World War II. Much of the trade thereafter shifted to Hong Kong, where dealers went directly to sell their stones, or through merchants from Yunnan.

Three decades later in the 1980s, with free market reforms under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, jade demand skyrocketed again, shifting the craftsmanship and sales back to China. Emerging economic prosperity and increased demand for luxury products in China since the 1990s has augmented the Chinese rush for Burmese jadeite. As the sole driver of the price of “imperial jade” globally, and almost only of value in the Chinese market, it eclipses per-carat that of diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, which are popular in other parts of the world.

In the 1990s, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), one of several ethnic armed groups which had been fighting the military regime for autonomy since 1961 along the countries’ frontiers, finally lost ­control of the valuable mines around Hpakant. From the Myanmar government’s perspective, the logic has been, the more jade reserves are depleted, the weaker the KIA will be. When jade mining began to boom in the 1990s, the town of Hpakant turned into a cesspool of crime, replete with drugs, prostitution, and arms trading.

Now firmly in control, the military junta or Tatmadaw, continues to handsomely profit from China’s renewed demand in jadeite, allotting the most lucrative areas of the mines to themselves, and in opaque collaboration with Chinese companies. Consequently, this has diminished the profits of the KIA and fighting continued until 1994 when a ceasefire was signed. When that happened, thousands from across Myanmar flocked to the Hpakant area to look for jade.

Under the 2008 constitutional framework, the military maintains wide-ranging autonomy and authority in many facets of operations in the country. Among the most prominent are its ownership of two large conglomerates owning a large number of businesses, including in the jade mining sector.

“The biggest problem is that the people have no ownership rights. A mutual sharing agreement that benefits the people there is very important for a jade mining area. The gains are only for the cronies and the people involved in the central government,” Tsa Ji, of the Kachin Development Networking Group, an association of Kachin civil society groups told Al Jazeera in 2015.

From 1994 until 2011, for nearly 17 years, the ceasefire between the Tatmadaw and the KIA held until fighting broke out again. Over the last decade, more than 100,000 Kachin and neighboring Shan state residents have been displaced by the conflict. Although diminished, the KIA still reportedly has its ways to extract its own revenues from local mining operations. Little to no revenue reaches the local Kachin population. Swedwatch said that, “the control over revenues from Kachin’s jade mines is a strategic priority for both sides in the ongoing armed conflict that has marred Kachin for six decades.”

According to The Irrawaddy, in mid June, the “(KIA) warned civilians in northern Shan State’s Kutkai this week that clashes could erupt anytime in the area between the ethnic armed group and the Myanmar military, or Tatmadaw.” The area is two hours from the Muse-Ruili border.

Coronavirus Changes

Although the country has so far been largely spared by the novel coronavirus, with just over 300 cases, it has shut down most of the corridors used to trade and smuggle jade, namely, across the Chinese border. This has already had major economic implications for those in the jade trade who cannot survive without buyers. Out of economic desperation caused by the pandemic, even more people have turned to working in the black market for local jade bosses.

The Mandalay jade market was closed in March after the government banned people from gathering in large numbers. It remains closed but the buying and selling of jade goes on in secret. There are internal travel restrictions and quarantine measures in place inside the country which limit the movement of people. Flights have stopped and Chinese business has significantly slowed, but the border is still open and some people have gone back and forth.

The entire future of the industry is highly uncertain these days, at least until the rainy season ends. The shutting down of border crossings and trade has cost Myanmar millions per day since January, putting many out of work without any source of income to draw from in Kachin. It is unclear how much cross border activity is currently permitted.

As long as there is jade left in Hpakant, demands from human rights and civil society groups are likely to be left unheard. Accidents will continue to happen, and drugs will continue to flow in this multi-billion dollar shadow industry. Myanmar has set its next general election for November 8.

“The longer the government waits to introduce rigorous reforms of the jade sector, the more lives will be lost. This was an entirely preventable tragedy that should serve as an urgent wake-up call for the government,” Donowitz added.

“The government should immediately suspend large-scale, illegal and dangerous mining in Hpakant and ensure companies that engage in these practices are no longer able to operate.”

The two soldiers confess their crimes in a monotone, a few blinks of the eye their only betrayal of emotion: executions, mass burials, village obliterations and rape.

The August 2017 order from his commanding officer was clear, Pvt. Myo Win Tun said in video testimony. “Shoot all you see and all you hear.”

He said he obeyed, taking part in the massacre of 30 Rohingya Muslims and burying them in a mass grave near a cell tower and a military base.

Around the same time, in a neighboring township, Pvt. Zaw Naing Tun said he and his comrades in another battalion followed a nearly identical directive from his superior: “Kill all you see, whether children or adults.”

“We wiped out about 20 villages,” Private Zaw Naing Tun said, adding that he, too, dumped bodies in a mass grave.

The video testimony from the two soldiers, which was shared with international prosecutors, is the first time that members of the Tatmadaw, as Myanmar’s military is known, have openly confessed to taking part in what United Nations officials say was a genocidal campaign against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority.

On Monday, the two men, who fled Myanmar last month, were transported to The Hague, where the International Criminal Court has opened a case examining whether Tatmadaw leaders committed large-scale crimes against the Rohingya.

The atrocities described by the two men echo evidence of serious human rights abuses gathered from among the more than one million Rohingya refugees now sheltering in neighboring Bangladesh. What distinguishes their testimony is that it comes from perpetrators, not victims.

“This is a monumental moment for Rohingya and the people of Myanmar in their ongoing struggle for justice,” said Matthew Smith, chief executive officer at Fortify Rights, a human rights watchdog. “These men could be the first perpetrators from Myanmar tried at the I.C.C., and the first insider witnesses in the custody of the court.”

The New York Times cannot independently confirm that the two soldiers committed the crimes to which they confessed. But details in their narratives conform to descriptions provided by dozens of witnesses and observers, including Rohingya refugees, Rakhine residents, Tatmadaw soldiers and local politicians.

And multiple villagers independently confirmed the whereabouts of mass graves that the soldiers provided in their testimony — evidence that will be seized on in investigations at the International Criminal Court and other legal proceedings. The Myanmar government has repeatedly denied that such sites exist across the region.

The crimes that the soldiers say were carried out by their infantry battalions and other security forces — some 150 civilians killed and dozens of villages destroyed — are just a part of Myanmar’s long campaign against the Rohingya. And they portray a concerted, calculated operation to exterminate a single ethnic minority group, the issue at the heart of ongoing genocide cases.

The massacres of Rohingya that culminated in 2017 catalyzed one of the fastest flights of refugees anywhere in the world. Within weeks, three-quarters of a million stateless people were uprooted from their homes in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State, as security forces attacked their villages with rifles, machetes and flamethrowers.

Old men were decapitated, and young girls were raped, their head scarves torn off to use as blindfolds, witnesses and survivors said. Doctors Without Borders estimated that at least 6,700 Rohingya, including 730 children, suffered violent deaths from late August to late September 2017. Roughly 200 Rohingya settlements were completely razed from 2017 to 2019, the United Nations said.

In a report published last year, a fact-finding mission for the United Nations Human Rights Council said “there is a serious risk that genocidal actions may occur or recur and that Myanmar is failing in its obligation to prevent genocide, to investigate genocide and to enact effective legislation criminalizing and punishing genocide.”

The Myanmar government has denied any orchestrated campaign against the Rohingya. Last December, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the nation’s civilian leader, defended Myanmar against charges of genocide in another case, this one at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. A Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has seen her legacy tarnished by her support for the military and her refusal to vocally condemn the persecution of the Rohingya.

Only a few Tatmadaw soldiers have been punished, with brief prison terms, for what the military says were isolated missteps in a couple of villages.

Although the Rohingya are from Rakhine State in Myanmar, the country’s government claims that they are foreign interlopers. Myanmar officials have suggested that the Rohingya burned down their own villages to garner international sympathy.

The two soldiers’ accounts shatter that official narrative.

It is not clear what will happen to the two men, who are not under arrest but were effectively placed in the custody of the International Criminal Court on Monday. They could provide testimony in court proceedings and be put in witness protection. They could be tried. The court’s office of the prosecutor refused to publicly comment on an ongoing case, but two people familiar with the investigations said that the men had already been questioned extensively by court officials in recent weeks.

The International Criminal Court normally pursues prosecutions of high-level figures accused of grave offenses such as genocide or crimes against humanity, not rank-and-file soldiers.

Payam Akhavan, a Canadian lawyer who is representing Bangladesh in a filing against Myanmar at the International Criminal Court, would not comment on the identities of the two men. But he called for accountability to prevent further atrocities against the 600,000 Rohingya who remain in Myanmar.

“Impunity is not an option,” Mr. Akhavan said. “Some justice is better than no justice at all.”

The soldiers’ accounts will also add weight to the separate case at the International Court of Justice, where Myanmar is being accused of trying to “destroy the Rohingya as a group, in whole or in part, by the use of mass murder, rape and other forms of sexual violence, as well as the systematic destruction by fire of their villages.”

That case was filed last year by Gambia on behalf of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Last week, the Netherlands and Canada announced that they would provide legal support to the effort to hold Myanmar accountable for genocide, calling it a matter “of concern to all of humanity.”

In August 2017, the 353 and 565 Light Infantry Battalions conducted “clearance operations” in the areas where the men said they did, Buthidaung and Maungdaw Townships. Commanding officers whom Private Myo Win Tun said ordered him to wipe out the Rohingya — Col. Than Htike, Capt. Tun Tun and Sgt. Aung San Oo — were operational there at the time, according to fellow soldiers.

There is a cell tower close to the 552 Light Infantry Battalion base, on the outskirts of Taung Bazar town, near where Private Myo Win Tun said he helped dig a mass grave. The base is well known in the area because it, along with two dozen border guard posts, was attacked by Rohingya insurgents on Aug. 25, 2017, galvanizing the brutal military operations against Rohingya civilians.

Rohingya refugees who lived in a village adjacent to the 552 encampment said they recognized Private Myo Win Tun. They described in precise detail the locations of two mass graves in that area. Residents still in the region, who spoke with The Times, also said they knew of mass burial sites near the military encampment.

Basha Miya, who is now a refugee in Bangladesh, said his grandmother was buried in one of the mass graves by the base, along with at least 16 others from the neighboring village of Thin Ga Net, known in the Rohingya language as Phirkhali.

“When I remember her, I just cry,” he said. “I feel bad that I couldn’t give her a proper funeral.”

After soldiers dumped the bodies in two graves by the banks of canals, they brought in bulldozers to cover the corpses, eyewitnesses said. Private Myo Win Tun said he and others buried eight women, seven children and 15 men in one grave.

Thin Ga Net village was wiped from the map by fire. Today, only a couple of water reservoirs hint that a bustling Rohingya village once stood there.

As they marauded through the villages around Taung Bazar, Private Myo Win Tun, 33, seems to have lost track of how many Rohingya he and his battalion killed. Was it 60 or 70? Maybe more?

“We indiscriminately shot at everybody,” he said in video testimony. “We shot the Muslim men in the foreheads and kicked the bodies into the hole.”

He also raped a woman, he said.

Private Zaw Naing Tun, a former Buddhist monk, admits to a similar fog, as his battalion’s killing of some 80 Rohingya stretched from hours into days. The soldier said he and other members of his battalion stormed through 20 villages in Maungdaw Township, including Doe Tan, Ngan Chaung, Kyet Yoe Pyin, Zin Paing Nyar and U Shey Kya.

Some of these villages were burned to the ground. Bashir Ahmed said that Tatmadaw battalions entered his hometown, Zin Paing Nyar, early on Aug. 26, 2017.

“They opened fire whenever they found someone in front of them,” he said. “They burned our houses. Nothing is left.”

More than 30 residents were killed in Zin Paing Nyar, according to survivors’ testimony.

Private Zaw Naing Tun, 30, said that he and four other members of his battalion shot dead seven Rohingya in Zin Paing Nyar. They captured 10 unarmed men, tied them with ropes, killed them and buried them in a mass grave north of the village, he said in the video testimony.

There are some discrepancies between the soldiers’ accounts and those of Rohingya villagers. Private Myo Win Tun described the cell tower as being east of the 552 base when it is, in fact, southwest.

But most of the other details are corroborated by statements from witnesses and survivors. In Ngan Chaung village, part of which was spared destruction, five or six soldiers from Light Infantry Battalion 353 arrived one afternoon in late August 2017 and singled out five women for rape, said a resident who still lives in the hamlet. The women’s husbands were later killed, he and other residents said.

Private Zaw Naing Tun said he didn’t commit sexual violence because he was too low-ranking to participate. Instead, he stood sentry as others raped Rohingya women, he said.

Both of the soldiers who admitted to killing Rohingya are themselves members of ethnic minorities in a country where persecution of such groups is institutionalized.

Earlier this year, the pair ended up in the custody of the Arakan Army, an ethnic Rakhine militia currently fighting the Tatmadaw, which recorded their video confessions. Both men said they deserted from the Tatmadaw.

Desertion is a particular problem in ethnic minority conflict zones, military insiders say. About 60 soldiers are believed to have gone A.W.O.L. from Light Infantry Battalion 565.

“I was racially discriminated against,” Private Myo Win Tun, a member of the Shanni ethnic group, said in his video testimony, in a rare burst of feeling.

Later, he would describe, in a flat voice, how his commanding officer, Colonel Than Htike, had instructed the battalion to “exterminate” the Rohingya.

“I was involved in the killing of 30 Muslim innocent men, women and children buried in one grave,” he said, as he stoically faced the camera.