Column | King Bouterse is dead, live the queen?

Now that it seems that the old party of Bouterse, the NDP, has won the elections, and there is a declaration of intent from six parties to form a new government together, it is likely that Jennifer Simons (call sign Jenny) will also become the next Surinamese president of the same NDP. Because King Bouterse is dead (December 23, 2024), long live the queen, from the same party, but especially: from the opposite sex. Simons would be the first woman to become president of the country. The Surinamese gender rights activist Karin Refos is therefore already experiencing ‘great joy’ at the NOS.

Have the gender rights now definitively defeated human rights? Fleur Agema Premier here, and all women happy?

« Surinamese society cannot afford a resentment with 600,000 inhabitants, » wrote Volkskrant-Journalist Ashwant Nandram on 28 May 2025. That comment refers to the Lange Bouterse-Tijd, the December murders in 1982, the dictatorial period before and after, and also on the Amnesty Act, which was adopted by the Surinamese Assembly (Parliament) in 2012. Bouterse thus dissolved criminal prosecution. Beautiful, serving role then for J. Simons, party mate and at that time chairman of that assembly, who skilfully guided the law through it. Incidentally, that amnesty law in 2023 was declared void.

End well, well, not jeremizing, looking ahead to a radiant future, now with a woman as a figurehead in the presidential palace. Journalist Nandram rightly notes about Bouterse’s former party leadership: « But working with a convicted criminal was even a bridge too far for Surinamese standards for Surinamese standards. »

But that blemish is no longer, he was erased with the death of Bouterse, although it would be a shame if Simons’ pronunciation from 1999 were forgotten: « If the December murders are really an issue, how can the NDP be so big? » A remark of Trumpian allure, analogue to the American platitude: « If you are so smart, why aren’t you rich. »

We are the largest and are therefore the greatest right. Wilders says it about the other day. Will it be better when a woman says so?

And with that resentment, that permanent anger that Suriname cannot afford, is not just the memory?

The Netherlands, with 18 million inhabitants, should therefore be able to afford a lot more resentment, and yet here too the habit of calling for every new, coalition arriving by government program: the past is over, a new, hopeful day is coming. Guts! It looks like mindfulness that only live in the here and now: politically speaking it is mentally.

The memory is a difficult thing, it gets things like those December murders of forty -three years ago, or, as in the Netherlands, of eighty years. Delete the commemoration of the dead? Don’t do it anymore? Remember the colonial period, apologize for it, or start all the way from Stunde Null? Everything one big, thunderous now?

That is nowhere, and certainly not in Suriname, where fifteen prominent Surinamese were murdered at the command of Bouterse. It is precisely in such a relatively small community that that is a huge attack: everyone knows someone who knows someone who is family of such a victim.

Sand over it? Yes, that’s how they do it with coffins.

Stephan Sanders is an essayist.

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