Suriname Seeks Arrest Of Ex-President After Massacre Conviction
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
PARAMARIBO/AMSTERDAM (Worthy News) – The Surinamese police issued an arrest warrant Wednesday for Suriname’s former president, Desi Bouterse, who was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for the killings of 15 opponents.
Police also searched for Bouterse’s former bodyguard, Iwan Dijksteel, as he received a 15-year sentence for participating in the massacre, known in Suriname as the ‘December Murders.’
The 1982 slaughter on December 7, 8, and 9 of that year remains an open wound in this sparsely populated former Dutch colony on the northeast edge of South America.
Bouterse, 78, has always denied responsibility for the torture and killings of the 15 innocent men despite his violent past.
He was Suriname’s de facto leader from 1980 to 1987 after leading a military coup, and then president from 2010 to 2020.
Following years of political and judicial wrangling, the country’s highest court upheld the verdicts for Bouterse and his co-accused for the torture and extrajudicial execution of 15 prominent lawyers, journalists, soldiers, business people, academics, and a trade union leader. All victims had been openly critical of the regime that brought him to power in a military coup in 1980
BOUTERSE AWAY
Yet Bouterse wasn’t attending the December sentencing hearing.
Local media later reported that he fled the country and flew to Brazil, where he continued his journey to Venezuela.
Those reports have not been confirmed, and prosecutors started searching for him on January 12 after he didn’t turn up at the jail where he was to begin his sentence, officials said.
“Suriname is a small community where people know each other,” a pastor from Suriname told Worthy News. “I have doubts that he will serve time in prison.”
His trial was closely followed in the nation of some 640,000 people, as well as within the 350,000-strong Surinamese community in the Netherlands.
Many left Suriname following its independence from the Netherlands in 1975 and the violent aftermath.
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