As leaders of his National Democratic Party (NDP) had bragged, Desi Delano Bouterse needed no formal send-off from the state as he was cremated on Saturday. Thousands of Surinamese either joined the funeral procession or lined the route from his city home to NDP headquarters, where he was eulogized and remembered as a fierce nationalist who had changed the country’s politics, albeit sometimes through extra-parliamentary means.
Bouterse, who died hours before Christmas Day at 79, was denied a state funeral by the administration of President Chan Santokhi, as the cabinet had cited his links to two previous military coups and the notorious December 1982 mass murders of 15 government opponents for which he was eventually convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison along with four co-defendants.
Instead of turning himself in in mid-January of last year to begin his sentence, Bouterse and trusted longtime bodyguard Iwan Dijksteel disappeared from view, and very few people would have set eyes on him before his lifeless body had mysteriously turned up at his riverside home hours before Christmas Day. An autopsy showed that he had died from liver failure linked to alcohol abuse.
The day began with close relatives, friends, and party leaders viewing the body at his home before the procession snaked its way through a meandering 20-mile route from his house to the NDP congress center, ofttimes stopped by grieving and weeping supporters who were able to view the body through the glass-fronted casket.
The former military strongman and two-time elected president was dressed in his favorite olive green combat fatigues, the wooden casket draped in the national flag and accompanied and flanked by elderly but slow-moving former soldiers, also clad in military fatigues. Unable to get into the ceremonies at party headquarters, thousands of other locals waited for at least three hours at the crematorium for a last glimpse of Bouterse, who died without serving a day in a jail cell. Police outriders accompanied the hearse.
In an interesting twist to Saturday’s events, authorities allowed Ernst Gefferie, Stephanus Dendoe, and Benny Brondenstein, the three co-defendants who turned themselves into prison officials a year ago, to individually pay their last respects to their former leader earlier in the day at the mortuary before being taken back to prison.
The mystery surrounding the appearance of his body at his city home has sparked a significant investigation as to how this could have been accomplished undetected by the security system, which had just recently stepped up raids of possible hiding places and had been monitoring his home and other places linked to the late NDP leader.
Meanwhile, his trusted comrade, Ramon Abrahams, who had served in the Dutch army alongside Bouterse before they both returned home as independence from the colonizer was dawning in late 1975, said he had made his intentions to flee clear to him hours before the Jan. 12 deadline to surrender.
“Ramon, under no circumstances will I let myself be locked up. I presented him with other options than fleeing, I will not say anything about that either, but he chose to do it the way it happened. I knew that whatever he did and wherever he went, he would be fine, and people would not be able to find him. He is too good a soldier for that. I also told the people: “Bouterse is fine where he is.”
“After the meeting, I got a phone call from him. ‘Ramon, I was able to follow what happened there and what was said. Thank you for everything, but I’m leaving,'” he told the leading De Ware Tijd newspaper.
Abrahams, Bouterse’s former works minister, said his late boss did not tell him where he was fleeing, only that he was in the hours before he disappeared.
“Because that is what you will ask. I do not know. I said brother, you are doing well. We discussed a few more things, such as continuing our ideals and how things should continue in the NDP. I wished him success and did not have to tell him that I accepted his decision. With that act, Bouterse also followed his path in relation to his ideals. His decision to leave fitted in perfectly with that picture. He let his conviction pass him by and never protested against judges. On the contrary, he even appeared before the military court. I would have done it differently. We asked him not to let it happen, but he chose to do so. I had hoped that he would at least live to see the elections. Because I had also told him that you will.”
