At the end of January, an important political and judicial issue could come to an end in Suriname as the trial in the mass murder of 15 people who were killed for opposing military rule in the country in 1982 is scheduled to come to an end.
Unless the defense can find some legal loophole or justification to delay the final set of hearings on January 31, former military strongman and two-time elected civilian President Desi Bouterse, 77, could have his 20-year jail sentence reaffirmed by a panel of judges.
Bouterse and four other defendants, mostly former soldiers, are on trial for the December 1982 murders of 15 people, including four journalists, who were executed at a colonial-era Dutch fort for allegedly collaborating with western nations to overturn a military coup that soldiers had staged in February 1980.
The panel held hearings in the past week and determined that the trial should conclude at the end of this month.
Late last year, the defense pulled off what had appeared to be a brilliant legal ploy to either delay the hearings or to have them restart altogether when it objected to the presence of one of the judges on the panel because he was related to one of the 15 victims.
Colonel Dennis Kemperveen is the military representative on the panel and the late Andre Kamperveen is a relative of his. The defense had filed strong objections to Dennis Kemperveen’s presence both because the two are relatives, and because they had claimed that the colonel had shown specific interest in Andre Kamperveen during hearings, alleging bias.
But investigations eventually determined that the two are very distant cousins and that the colonel had asked questions of other defendants during hearings late last year, not specifically about Andre Kamperveen, so the court dismissed the objections and cause for any form of delay, going ahead with hearings and determining that the decades-old trial should finally conclude with the final hearings at month’s end.
In late 2019, Bouterse was sentenced to 20 years in prison for ordering the executions. He has persistently denied doing so, accepting collective responsibility only because he was the de facto head of state at the time. Witnesses have, however, placed him at the fort during the time firing squads were killing the 15, who included clergy, academics and labor leaders.
It is unclear whether lead counsel Irvin Kanhai can pull off any other legal trick or maneuver from his decades of experience as the country’s leading lawyer. If not, the court is likely to reaffirm the 20-year sentence on Bouterse because the prosecution has said that its band of witnesses had remained firm in their evidence that Bouterse had not only ordered the killings but also was present during the executions.
The killings had shocked Suriname’s Caribbean neighbors, as it did for the former Dutch colony, just seven years after it became an independent nation. The military was adamant that the 15 were collaborating with the Dutch, the French via neighboring French Guiana and the U.S. to reverse the coup.
“My responsibility commanded me to have the people picked up and to defuse the case. I know it was never the intention to pick up people and kill them,” Bouterse told the court. Bouterse had served two five-year terms as the leader of the National Democratic Party (NDP) and had also run the country in the late ’90s for a single truncated term.
Initially, more than 20 defendants were on trial. Some had been civilians who had served in the military administration up to the late ’80s before the resumption of free elections. At least half a dozen have died, leaving Bouterse and four others to face trial.