‘Cale Dixon and the Moguk Murders’ Exerpt

Moguk Murders Excerpt

When we were little boys we went to school together, north of here in the Moguk region.  Our fathers’ were jewelers and miners, as were their fathers.  My grandfather was here when the British over ran and ruled our country.  Our family was hired by the British because of my grandfather’s skill and knowledge.  He used to tell us stories about the funny ways of the foreigners.  Many stories had to do with greed and the want of our natural resources.  In the surrounding hills and mountains there are Teak, Evergreen, and Tropical Evergreen trees.  On the eastern mountainside of the Shan plateau, opium is grown and has been growing there for a long time.  In the Irrawaddy valley, we can grow cotton, ground nuts, jute, rubber trees, coconut, tobacco, tea, citrus fruits, sugarcane, wheat and dry rice.  We used to grow wet rice in exportable amounts much greater than today.  Below the surface of our country we can mine for; lead, zinc, tin, iron, nickel, copper, coal, oil, natural gas, and, my favorite, precious and semi-precious stones. We have Tigers eyes, zircons, sapphires, spinrels, tourmalines, and rubies, among others.  From generation to generation we have been working the stones.  When the British came we mined for them.

The British came in three waves taking our lands and changing our way of life.  My grandfather was a very smart man and learned English very quickly.  But he did not let the officers and the businessmen know how much English.  He also understood their greed for he shared in their desire for the stones.  While working and cutting stones for the British, he would take a few rough stones every day.  For twenty years he took stones from the British businessmen.  And what would you expect, he was a jeweler.  With his humble treasure, he insured our futures, at least as far as he could see.  My father learned from my grandfather and became one of the finest freehand stone cutters in Burma.  The queen of England has some of his works and the King of Thailand and many other royal families around the world.  These are the stones with pigeon blood color.  To our family, it is not pigeon blood.  It is our blood and our country’s blood and sweat that help make the stones come to life.  My father went to the University of Rangoon for a short time.  He met with Thakin Aung San, a hero of his time.  He also met Thakin Nu, who later became our Prime minister.  Many of the Thakin party leaders were in university at that time, some older, all with eyes wide open.  My father wanted to join with them and fight for our country’s independence.  My grandfather wouldn’t have it.  For fear of his son’s life, my grandfather took him out of university and brought him home, back to the jewelry shop where he remained and started a family.  This is my younger brother and these two are my adopted cousins.  Their father died of malaria and my father and mother brought them and their mother into our house to stay forever.  All four of us went to University as well.  But the political situation had gotten worse after our independence in nineteen forty-eight.  Some insurgent groups in the hills didn’t want to live under the same constitution or religion.  Some wanted their own independent state.  Fighting was everywhere.  In July, nineteen forty-seven, General Aung San and seven of his ministers were killed by U Saw and his gunmen.  Many believe Thakin Shu Maung was the master mind.  You may know him as, Ne Win.  He ran the military and our Prime minister, U Nu, from puppet strings when he was alive, very powerful.  The fight against what he put in political motion goes on today through Aung San’s daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi.  Our father did as his father did and brought us home.

When U Nu became the Prime Minister, he ran the country until nineteen sixty-two when Ne Win organized a coup of the government for a second time and quickly replaced most of the civil leaders with devoted military officers.  The military dug into every aspect of our lives.  Many innocent people were killed.  Many people went to prison, many died there and some were put in jail back then and are still in there today.  All communications were cut off to those in prison.  Ne Win began rounding up the princes of our country plus the educated people of the country as a whole, all people who wore glasses were considered educated.  It was ridiculous.  Anyway, this severed our country and shattered our dreams of a unified true democracy.  Some of the hill tribes remained autonomous and outside the circle of influence of the Tatmandaw and the military in Rangoon.  But the military pursued villagers into the jungles, killing, raping, and destroying our way of life with every step they took.  This has not stopped, even today.  Foreign powers turn a blind eye because we have nothing they want.  They publicly support democracy but in truth, they obviously don’t really care. Meanwhile, the military are using civilians to build roads through our pristine jungles, disrupting all life in their path.  If we had lots of oil in the ground, democracy would have been supported by the outside world and we would not have had to live in what seems an eternal life of slavery and terror.  The only countries that pay any attention to us today are those that utilize and profit from our bountiful black market.  Through our black market you can get anything; women, children, opium, marijuana, stones, and much, much more.  The Western nations impose futile sanctions. Corporations and their products which are supposedly not allowed, I can go down the street and get right now. Most of the sanctions only change the direction of the smuggling and of course, the price, but still available.  If you want it, you can get it.”  The jeweler took a drag from his cheroot which was smoldering between his fingers then continued, “As the round ups continued, my father was told that his name and his sons were on one of the military lists to be picked up.   And so he tried to secure passage to Thailand for all of us.  It was a total disaster.  We went to the airport in two cars.  Our father drove with our mothers in the first car.  We four young men were in the trunk of the second car stuffed behind our belongings.  There were some cars between our parent’s car and ours.  Our father and mothers were stopped, dragged out of their car and arrested.  We never saw or heard from them again.  Our driver, a neighbor friend in the military, turned off the main street.  We were stopped at a road block but our driver was in military uniform and talked his way out of the situation.  He drove for many hours with us suffocating in the boot of the car.  He drove us to the edge of the jungle where he found a mass grave of people not yet buried because the military was not done killing.  We pulled four young men’s bodies out of the pile that were our size and one man’s body.  We put them on top of the car and drove to a ravine where we changed clothes with the dead.  We put all our papers, our glasses, our watches, everything we had on them. Everything we owned we gave to the dead and prayed with tears we never knew we had.  Our driver lit the car on fire and pushed it over the edge of the cliff.  We watched it burn and explode at the bottom of a ravine.  We covered our tracks and ran with the ghosts of the dead into the darkness of the jungle never to be heard from again.  The only thing we kept from our past was the stones.

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