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The December Murders (Dutch: Decembermoorden) refers to the murders on 7, 8, and 9 December 1982, of fifteen prominent young Surinamese men who had criticized the military dictatorship then ruling Suriname. Thirteen of these men were arrested on December 7 between 2 AM and 5 AM while sleeping in their homes (according to reports by the families of the victims). The other two were Surendre Rambocus and Jiwansingh Sheombar who were already imprisoned for attempting a counter-coup in March 1982. Soldiers of Dési Bouterse, the then dictator of Suriname, took them to Fort Zeelandia (the then headquarters of Bouterse), where they were heard as 'suspects in a trial' by Bouterse and other sergeants in a self-appointed court. After these 'hearings' they were tortured and shot dead. The circumstances have not yet become completely clear; on December 10, 1982, Bouterse claimed on national television that all of the detainees had been shot dead 'in an attempt to flee'.
Contents
- Description
- Victims of the December murders
- The suspects
- Aftermath and legal action
- United Nations
- References
The December Murders led to international protest by numerous Western countries and human rights organizations. The former colonial power, Netherlands, immediately froze development aid. Many Surinamese civilians fled Suriname for the Netherlands.
Bouterse has long denied guilt in the December Murders. In March 2007 he accepted political responsibility for the murders, but he then also explicitly stated that he personally had not 'pulled the trigger' to kill those fifteen men. In March 2012, however, a former confidant of Bouterse testified under oath that Bouterse himself had shot two of the victims.
Description
After their abduction, the fifteen victims were transported to Fort Zeelandia, the then headquarters of Bouterse and his soldiers in Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname. The soldiers performing the action were under command of Dési Bouterse, the then dictator of Suriname and also leader of the Surinamese army. Among the victims were lawyers, journalists, businessmen, soldiers, university teachers and a union leader.
A sixteenth arrested person, union leader Fred Derby, was released unexpectedly on December 8. Derby reported his experiences on December 8, 2000, saying he was not murdered because, Bouterse told him, he was needed to cool the temper of the unions, which were frequently on strike at that time.
Victims of the December murders
The suspects
In the December murders trial that commenced on November 30, 2007 there were 25 suspects with Desi Bouterse being the only main suspect.
Aftermath and legal action
Only after many years the Surinamese government took the first official legal steps toward clarifying the case. After the murders, the victims' bodies were buried without post mortem examinations having been performed; moreover, no legal investigation was conducted.
Politically, the murders continue to exert an influence on Surinam politics. After the 2010 Parliamentary elections, won by Bouterse, then-president Ronald Venetiaan refused to even mention Bouterse's name or congratulate him; Venetiaan, the Minister of Education in the government of Henck Arron, prime minister of the government overthrown by Bouterse in 1982, was a personal friend of most of the fifteen victims.
After the election of Bouterse as president of Suriname in August 2010, Parliament moved in 2012 to amend a 1992 amnesty law to include the period of the December murders. The amendment was signed into law in April 2012 by the vice president, and resulted in halting the murder trial against (among others) then-president Desi Bouterse. The trial in front of the court-martial was halted to await a judgment of the Constitutional Court - which was defined by law, but never appointed. After some years of standstill and no appointment of a Constitutional Court, the trial continued in 2015 after an order of the court-martial. Using his authority as defined in article 148 of the Constitution of Suriname, President Bouterse then declared that the trial was a threat to national security, and ordered the prosecutor to halt prosecution on 29 June 2016. The court-martial was expected to continue the trial and consider this new fact by 30 November 2016, but this time the trial was postponed until 30 January because of illness of one of the judges. Eventually the court-martial ordered the prosecutor on 30 January 2017 to read the charges and ignore the instructions by the President because the matter was no longer in hands of the executive but of the judicial branch. Next, the continuation of the trial was postponed to await the outcomes and timelines in other trials.
United Nations
In 1983, relatives of eight of the victims asked the United Nations Human Rights Committee to state their opinion on the case. They wanted the Committee to state that the executions were contradicting with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. They assumed that within Suriname there were no legal means for them. Although the Suriname government requested to have the case declared as insusceptible, the committee judged that the 15 victims were "arbitrarily deprived of their lives contrary to article 6 (1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights", and appealed Suriname to investigate the murders and prosecute the ones responsible.