Election of the Day I: Suriname

A few days before Christmas, in a hideout deep somewhere in the jungles of the Copi Nature Reserve in Northeaster Suriname, a fugitive of justice and Suriname’s most wanted man, Desi Bouterse, died of complications from liver disease. He was 79. Over the course of the preceding eight decades, Bouterse had held many roles. He was a husband and father, a Dutch and then Surinamese military officer, an alcoholic, a successful two-term president, the leader of a violent military-led coup d’etat and brutal, murderous dictator, and convicted drug smuggler. Born to a middle class family in Donburg in 1945 with a multiracial background that represents much of Suriname’s remarkable ethnic diversity (a mix of Dutch, Chinese, French, Amerindian, and African heritage), he excelled in school and moved to Holland in the early 60’s where he joined the military. After a successful decade+ into his Dutch military career, he took his young family (he married a woman from his home village and had two children with her while serving in the Dutch military) back to Suriname upon his home country’s independence in 1975, with the aim of helping build the newly independent country’s military. He quickly moved up the ranks and, in 1980, at the age of 35, was one of the main architects of the “Seargent’s Coup”, a successful military overthrow of the democratic civilian government led by Henck Arron. (Arron would return to politics as vice president in 1988, only to lose power in another coup in 1990).

The Seargent’s coup had a distinct class element to it. Arron, Suriname’s first leader, was a wealthy banker, and favoritism and class solidarity among Suriname’s elites had been a prominent feature of his government. To Bouterse, and other military officers of modest background and means, the corruption, class solidarity, and faovritism radicalized them against the nascent democratic regime. Indeed, the proximate motivation for their coup was union-busting; Arron ended by fiat their efforts to unionize the military, which motivated them to seek redress for their grievances by other means.

It would be a mistake to allow the above paragraph is giving you any degree of sympathy for Bouterse. The military regime was brutal. The first few years saw several failed counter-coups and increasingly oppressive and brutal responses from his regime. A particularly noteworthy incident, known as “the December Murders”, took place over a few days in early December of 1982. Fifteen prominent journalists, academics, lawyers, and military leaders he didn’t trust, all of whom had been publicly critical of the Bouterse regime were rounded up, taken to his stronghold at Fort Zeelandia, tortured for several days, and then shot. One victim, journalist Frank Wijngaarde, was a Dutch citizen. (A 16th victim, labor leader Fred Derby, was merely tortured for several days and then released, as evidently Bouterse was concerned killing him might further radicalize unions.) This incident produced significant outrage, domestic and international. Many of Bouterse’s critics fled the country, and the Netherlands cut off all development aid in response, putting Bouterse’s regime in a precarious financial position,, which was worsened by declining Bauxite prices, as Bauxite was then Suriname’s most lucrative export. Bouterse turned to Cuba, North Korea, and the USSR as potential allies in light of this, although he’d soon flip after the US invasion of Grenada, expelling Cuban diplomats in an effort to curry favor with the Reagan Administration.

In 1986, another significant uprising began in the sparsely populated Southern and Eastern regions of the country, led by indigenous and maroon communities in those regions. A leader of this uprising was Ronnie Brunswijk, who happened to be Bouterse’s former bodyguard, having once taken a bullet for him. In 1984, Brunswijk (much like Bouterse just five years prior) agitated for better conditions and pay for him and his fellow soldiers, which was denied by Bouterse. This falling out culminated in Brunswijk fleeing to the South, and Bouterse’s regime convicting and sentencing him in absentia for bank robbery. Bouterse was consumed by this betrayal, and that anger shaped the regime’s response to the Southern uprising, as seen in the Moiwana massacre of November 1986. Moiwana, a maroon village on the border with French Guiana and Ronnie Brunswijk’s home town, was attacked by 70 Suriname Army soldiers, with the evident intent of destroying the village and wiping out its entire population. It was successful, largely, in the first aim but less so in the second, while at least 35 people were killed most of the villagers managed to flee across the border.

There were surely many other atrocities committed by the military regime during their seven years of rule, but these two stand out because they would eventually catch up with Bouterse, as we’ll see shortly. Bouterse did invite and participate in a transition to democracy, beginning with lifting the ban on opposition parties in 1985. A new democratic constitution was approved by plebiscite in late 1987 and a democratic election was help a few months later. An opponent of Bouterse and ally of Arron won the presidency. But as military commander Bouterse retained considerable power, and tensions with the democratic regime resulted in him seizing power, again, in a bloodless coup in 1990. A few years later, elections and civilian rule returned, and while Bouterse remained in his military leadership position, he stepped back from actively messing with civilian governments and something approximating democratic rule began to emerge.

Bouterse’s legal troubles began in 1999, when he was convicted of drug trafficking in the Netherlands, in absentia. According to the Dutch prosecutors, he used his position as military leader and as leader of the Suri Kartel, to orchestrate a scheme that resulted in roughly a half-ton of cocaine smuggled through Schiphol airport in the early 1990’s. Europol issued a warrant for his arrest that year, a warrant that stayed in effect for the remaining 25 years of his life. Suriname refused to extradite, and he spends the next 10 years getting involved in democratic politics, obtaining key leadership roles in the NDP (National Democratic Party). The main opposition to Bouterse and the NDP, a social democratic coalition, managed to cobble together enough votes to block him from becoming president after the 2005 coalition. In a story that may be familiar to those who’ve followed American politics in the last five years, that coalition began to explore legal charges against him for the December murders. He was formally charged in late 2007, and spent the next three years delaying the trial proceedings through various legal maneuvers. His trial finally began in late 2009, coinciding with his run for president. In the end, the slow pace of justice was too slow to prevent his return to power.

In the 2010 legislative election, the NDP was the leading party, obtaining 23 of the 51 seats in the National Assembly. In Suriname, the president is elected by 2/3 majority of the National Assembly. On the second ballot, after negotiating coalition agreements with two minor parties, the brutal military dictator became president. This was a difficult pill to swallow for his opponent and incumbent president, Ronald Venetiaan, who had been an opposition figure during the 1980s and was close personal friends with several of the victims of the December murders. The unrepentant coup leader turned president went on a pardoning spree for many of his surviving co-conspirators and made February 25, the date of the coup, a national holiday. Among the many convicts and former colleagues he pardoned and gave positions of power within his regime were his son, Dino, who like him was convicted of drug trafficking, and his foster son, convicted of bank robbery. His election put his trial on hold, but did not formally end it. In 2012, his party passed an amnesty law designed to alleviate any legal responsibility for his actions regarding the December murders. This law, however, would be ruled unconstitutional by Suriname’s supreme court, opening the door to his trial continuing after he left office.

Here’s where things get complicated: Bouterse’s presidency wasn’t an across the board disaster. He managed to accomplish a number of major social democratic policy goals (universal health care, minimum wage, national pension scheme, free school meals) that the social democratic party did not. It was also an era of economic mismanagement, exploding deficits and inflation, but the good evidently outweighed the bad for Surinamese voters, who gave Bouterse and the NPD a second term in 2015. During his second term, his health worsened; he frequently few to Cuba (of the few places he could go in the world where he would not fear arrest, but that also had excellent health care for him) for various medical procedures. The ruling of his amnesty law as unconstitutional opened the door for resuming his trial during his presidency, and he was convicted in a military court in 2019, and sentenced to 20 years. He appealed this decision in January of 2020, and continued his presidency while the appeal was pending. He’d hoped to retain power in the 2020 election, banking on the COVID incumbent bump that appeared to benefit ruling parties around the world, but the Surinamese electorate wasn’t having it, and the opposition Progressive Reform Party won a decisive victory. There were allegations of efforts at electoral fraud by a number of Bouterse aligned figures; his grandson allegedly attempted to steal ballots and start fires in a ballot counting room. But in the end the result were certified and he left office. His appeal dragged on until is was ultimately rejected in 2023, inaugurating his final chapter, “dying fugitive of justice, hiding in the jungle.”

With leads us to today’s election, currently underway in Suriname. It’s the first election in Surinamese history without Bouterse’s presence in some capacity since the inaugural election in 1975. (Bouterse’s son Dino, once seen as a possible successor, presently resides in a Federal penitentiary in Yazoo City, Mississippi, where he is serving a 16+ year sentence for arms and drug trafficking, as well as attempting to aid a terrorist organization–he was trying to set up a Hezbullah facility in Suriname. His widow remains on the NDP list, but does not lead the party.) Instead, both his party and the country are largely out from under his legacy. Nuts and bolts: 51 seats are elected via nationwide PR (in the past, elections used PR in several multimember districts, but these districts were recently ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.) I’ve not seen any polling, but references to polling suggest it’s indecisive and there’s no clear leader. In addition to the incumbent Progressive Reform Party (formerly leftist, now more centrist, long associated with the Indo-Surinamese community) and the NDP (now occupying a leftist lane), our old friend Ronnie Brunswijk is leading the center-left General Liberation and Development Party that is expected to perform well. A major issue in this election is how to spend the upcoming expected windfall from the Gran Margu offshore oil and gas drilling project expected to enter into production in 2028. Incumbent president Chan Santokhi has pledged to use much of this money for the country’s green energy transition, emphasizing the temporary nature of this windfall. NDP leader Jennifer Simons is pre-accusing the current regime of fraud. Preliminary results should be available this evening.