Considering that there is considerable traffic between Guyana and Suriname at the level of the ordinary citizen, remarkably little is publicised here about the government of our eastern next-door-neighbour. This is perhaps surprising considering that politics there is considerably more labyrinthine in character than here, and has been more disquieting in its evolutionary trajectory than anything which has come within the ambit of our political experience. Grenada aside, we are not the ones in Caricom who can provide evidence of the most egregious assaults on democracy; that dubious distinction belongs to Suriname.
If anyone on the street here were to be asked to name a Suriname politician, the one they would be most likely to know would be Desi Bouterse. And that would not be without good reason; he has dominated Surinamese politics for more than forty years. On Wednesday, he was in the headlines again for losing his appeal against a twenty-year sentence for the murder of fifteen people. It is a case which goes back forty-one years, and there must have been long periods when the relatives of those who died despaired of ever seeing justice for them. Yet four decades on, the rule of law has asserted itself.
It was not inevitable that this would happen, and the political situation was often against it. Even after the trial finally got under way sixteen years ago, Mr Bouterse used his position to try and derail the course of justice. That said, it is not inevitable that he will go to jail. So far he has not even been arrested since that is a matter which lies in the hands of the prosecution, not the court. It may be they are waiting to see if he appeals for a pardon to President Chandrikapersad Santokhi, since he has eight days following the upholding of the conviction in which he could do that. If he does so, it will not be an easy appeal for him to make, since Mr Santokhi was first the police chief and then the Justice Minister who doggedly pursued the case against him. There are no rules about a time period within which the President has to issue his verdict, so theoretically speaking the appellant’s status could be in suspension for some time.
Mr Bouterse retired from active politics in 2020, but his party, the NDP, is still an active political force with a large following, and one of its leading figures was quoted as saying, “Bouterse will not go to jail. You can write that down.” It is not clear exactly what was intended by this, but the fear that there could be disorder if he were imprisoned is probably general. Paramaribo like Georgetown is no stranger to disturbances, and in fact there was concern there would be trouble on the day of the ruling. As such schools were closed during the hearing, and streets in the centre of the city were blocked off, while for their part the US and Dutch embassies warned of potential unrest. However, Mr Bouterse himself had told his party that there was “no point in letting things get out of hand,” and as it was, everything passed off peacefully.
Mr Bouterse’s violent advent into politics occurred in 1980, when along with fifteen other sergeants he overthrew the government of Henck Arron only five years after Suriname’s independence. As the leader of the group he became Chairman of the National Military Council and effectively therefore the ruler of the country. Initially the coup was quite popular with the public, but the restrictions on various freedoms such as that of the press which came to be imposed changed perceptions, and unrest began to make itself felt. At one point the University of Suriname was closed down, and subsequently political parties were banned and freedom of assembly regulated.
It was in 1982 that sixteen critics of the military government were rounded up and brought to what was then the army headquarters at Fort Zeelandia. They mostly comprised trade union leaders, academics, lawyers and journalists and fifteen of them were first tortured and then shot. The one who escaped this fate was union leader Fred Derby, who later said he did not know why he was spared, but that Bouterse was there that night, something which the latter has strenuously denied. Derby was supposed to be the star witness in the first trial, but the day before he was due to testify he suffered a heart attack while playing football, and later died in hospital.
The military government found itself under all kinds of pressure: internal, external and economic, and in 1985 it lifted the ban on opposition political parties, and the drafting of a new constitution began. This was adopted in 1987, and following elections Ramsewak Shankar was elected President. He was a Bouterse opponent, however, and following an incident in Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, he was ousted by phone in 1990, in what became known as the Telephone Coup. Bouterse did not remain in power for long, however, as Ronald Venetiaan was elected President in 1991, and thereafter elections were held on a regular basis, and the former coup leader confined himself to trying to gain power via the democratic route. He eventually succeeded in 2010, winning re-election in 2015.
Following complaints by the families of the men killed in 1982 a military court with civilian judges was finally set up in 2007 to hear the charges against Bouterse and 24 others. It was plagued with delays of one kind or another, not the least of which was the amnesty granting the accused immunity in 2012. By this time Mr Bouterse had been voted legitimately into office (in 2010), and used his party’s position in Parliament to get an amendment to the Amnesty Law passed in his favour. It caused outrage, both within and outside Suriname, and was eventually overturned.
In 2019 the court sentenced Bouterse to 20 years for the murders, a verdict which it confirmed in 2021. After losing his appeal on Wednesday, the former coup leader has no other legal recourse. He has maintained at various points that the 15 were plotting to overthrow the government, and were shot dead while trying to flee Fort Zeelandia, and that the decision for the killings was made not by him but by the Battalion Commander, who, it must be noted, died in 1996. He accepted political responsibility as leader, he said, but was not directly involved as he was not there.
Fred Derby was not the only witness to say Bouterse was present at the killings; there was also one of the accused, Ruben Rozendaal, who in 2012 said he wanted to change his testimony and tell the truth because he did not have long to live owing to severe kidney disease. He testified that Bouterse personally killed two of the men: union leader Cyrill Daal and a military man, Soerindre Rambocus. This was only a day or two before the amnesty.
There are two other things about Desi Bouterse which while not related to the case of the 15 murders might be worth mentioning. One is the suppression of an insurgency by the maroons calling themselves the Jungle Commando, which began in 1986 and was led by Ronnie Brunswijk, a former bodyguard of Bouterse. It was dealt with violently by the military government, and among other things involved the massacre of 39 villagers, mostly women and children of Moiwana, Brunswijk’s natal village. In addition, a chief inspector of police who was investigating the massacre was assassinated. Until now, no one has been held responsible for the killings, although in 2005 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered Suriname to pay compensation to the survivors of the massacre.
Then there is the matter of drug-trafficking, after Bouterse was convicted in 1999 in absentia in the Netherlands for trafficking cocaine, something which he denies. He is alleged to have led the Suri cartel, which smuggled large amounts of cocaine from Suriname and Brazil into Europe. Mr Bouterse’s son Dino, was also sentenced by a Suriname court for narcotics trafficking among other things, but was released early. He was subsequently sentenced to 16 years in New York for drug smuggling and trying to help Hezbollah set up a base in Suriname; he was reported to have written that he had no terrorist leanings and was only motivated by profit.
So now, after all this time Suriname justice has managed to uphold a conviction in the 1982 murders. Given Suriname’s sometimes violent and unpromising history since independence when it was not at all clear whether the accused would face the law, it transpires that democracy with all that that implies, and the rule of law have triumphed. While the country might not be altogether out of the woods yet on this issue, it is unquestionably facing in the right direction.