The results of last Tuesday’s elections in Suriname have provoked predictable reactions from interested parties. The fearsome outcome is that the political alliance – de Mega Combinatie or Mega Combination – led by the National Democratic Party of which former military dictator Désiré Delano Bouterse is chairman captured 23 of the 51 seats in the National Assembly. Bouterse is still perceived as a charismatic and pragmatic man of action and his alliance appealed to the young and poor with sugary promises for easy jobs and cheap housing.
Memories are short. The young have no recollection of Bouterse’s blotchy record of governance. He seized power in a coup d’etat in 1980 and left office only under intense international pressure in 1987 but seized power again in another coup d’etat in 1990. He still faces criminal charges for his role in the extra-judicial execution of political opponents in 1982. He was convicted in a court in the Netherlands for trafficking cocaine from Suriname to the Netherlands in 1999, but avoided serving a sentence because both countries prohibit extradition of each others’ citizens.
Bouterse’s party was also part of President Jules Wijdenbosch’s 1996 coalition administration. Wijdenbosch embarked on internal policies which practically bankrupted the country and on external policies which provoked aggression against Guyana and defied the Caribbean Community.
It was no surprise, therefore, that the election results have generated uneasiness and despondency. Outgoing President Ronald Venetiaan who leads the minority New Front for Democracy and Development alliance confirmed that his group would not work with the Combinatie as long as Bouterse remained in control. Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said that the Netherlands respected the will of the electorate but added that “the past cannot be forgotten…Mr. Bouterse has been sentenced to an 11-year prison term in the Netherlands for drug dealing and, in Suriname, a case about the murders of December 1982 is still proceeding. We cannot brush all that away.”
Suriname’s president has to be elected by a two-thirds vote in the National Assembly. But the country’s 20 ethno-political parties jostle for power through half-dozen shifting alliances in which no single party can claim an absolute majority. There must be hard bargaining to choose a new president and to construct a cabinet. Bouterse’s Mega Combinatie will be obliged to cooperate with A-Com or A-1 alliances if it is to form a viable administration.
Whatever the outcome, Guyanese will long remember that, 25 years ago, Bouterse’s administration launched Operation Schoon Schip (Clean Sweep) in which over 5,000 Guyanese and Haitian workers were expelled, some being physically molested and having their possessions confiscated. Guyanese will remember, also, that Wijdenbosch’s administration inflicted humiliating conditions on Guyana over the Canawaima ferry project which now flies the Suriname national flag and is subject to the jurisdiction only of Suriname’s courts.
Guyana was the victim of aggression when Suriname deployed its gunboats to expel the Canadian CGX petroleum platform and dominate Guyana’s maritime zone in June 2000.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett only in February this year protested about Wijdenbosch’s wild plan to invade Guyana’s New River territory in 2000.
Guyana’s weak ambassadors and ineffectual administration officials have generally been treated disrespectfully by Paramaribo’s bureaucrats who insist on sticking irrelevant references to their spurious territorial claims in most communiqués and minutes and rudely offer novelties and gifts depicting maps of the New River Zone as part of Suriname. Georgetown’s protests to Paramaribo are rarely answered.
Given Bouterse’s big score in last week’s elections and Wijdenbosch’s likely return, Georgetown’s policy-makers need to be concerned about the power play in Paramaribo. Unfavourable as interstate relations have been, they could get worse.
