And now for something completely different ...

Part 2: I finally learn not to smoke in public

I read this week in a BBC news article that Desi Bouterse, the much-reviled former dictator of Suriname—and almost unbelievably, later its former two-term president—is awaiting a high court ruling that might actually send him to prison for murder. I will believe that when I see it.

Convicted in 2019, after a trial stretching over 12 years, of involvement in the 1982 deaths of political opponents, he still cannot be imprisoned until his appeal gets ruled on. After 43 years of running things in that unfortunate country pretty much as he wanted—with terrifying consequences for anyone who crossed him—he could get exactly what he deserves, or continue to give the rest of the world the middle finger.

Desi Bouterse, former president of Suriname.
Official government portrait, 2010.

I lived in Paramaribo for almost two years, from early 1989 to the fall of 1990, as an officer at the U.S. embassy. My job was purely administrative—I had very little direct contact with people in the government, such as it was—a struggling democracy that cowered at his every word, even after he relinquished direct military rule and allowed the parliament to meet, if not do anything. Everyone I met there would shake their heads privately and bemoan their fate, but in public, profess sycophantic admiration for the man who singlehandedly undermined every decent thing about the country after the Dutch unexpectedly set it free.

They were understandably afraid of his brutal reputation—that if so motivated, he would send his henchmen out to “disappear” you. The rumors were that a certain powdery white substance—let’s call it sugar—had so interfered with his judgment that he could no longer even remember people’s names when he met them.

He was always suspected of either murdering or gleefully witnessing the executions of 15 political opponents in 1982, the so-called “December murders.” In 1999, he was convicted in absentia in the Netherlands for drug trafficking. Absent an extradition treaty, of course, all he had to do was laugh and not travel to Amsterdam on KLM. After years of trying, the former dictator (1980-1987) was elected president of the country in 2010—a largely ceremonial post, with perks—by the parliament, after political finagling gained his party a coalition majority.

One article I found in the New York Times mentioned that during two subsequent terms as president—a post he lost only when his coalition lost control of Parliament—he had arranged for his current wife, Ingrid Bouterse-Waldring, to become a government employee, of sorts. She was to be paid a $4,000 monthly salary for serving as First Lady, with unspecified duties. His son, a convicted felon, became a high-ranking military officer. This in one of the poorer countries in the Western Hemisphere—once, before independence, with the highest per-capita income of all.

That started me thinking again about his former wife, also named Ingrid, who once lived in a comfortable house in the same middle-upper-class neighborhood where I lived—and well guarded, especially at night.

I never met her, thankfully, although I lived a block away and often walked past her driveway to other homes in the neighborhood—those of other Americans whose homes were either owned or leased by the U.S. government. Through floor-to-ceiling windows at the end of her driveway, when the curtains were open, you could see a life-size portrait of the former dictator—in full military regalia—to whom she was still attached, I guess, even after their recent divorce. But to get to my embassy pal’s house, I had to walk right past it; too close to waste gasoline by starting up the engine, even in my Volkswagen bug, I thought.

My buddy did not smoke and would not tolerate anyone smoking near him. Back in those days, I was still a pack-a-day man—my stressful job had done nothing to change that habit—and always had one last cigarette on my way to his house to have a meal or play cards. One night, after dusk, I was puffing away when the young military guard came walking down the former wife’s driveway to meet me, and my heart sank. Had someone—anyone, his spies were everywhere—heard me crack a joke about the Top Banana? Was I about to disappear, without a trace? Who would feed my dog?

He spoke little English—most soldiers, barely educated, spoke only Dutch or Sranan tongo, a patois-like amalgamation of many languages, including Hebrew!!—but instinctively pointed to my glowing cigarette, which he had seen in the darkness. All he wanted was a light. He had no matches. So I nervously offered him a light, and moved on, shaking. I had always been warned that smoking on the street, in stores, in better restaurants, anywhere in public view (at least by nonsmokers), was simply in bad form—not yet officially discouraged by the U.S. government, although that came soon after.

I don’t think I ever lit a cigarette in public again without looking over my shoulder. Within a decade or so, I quit smoking permanently—victim of skyrocketing tobacco taxes in the People’s Republic of Northern Virginia—and have not set foot in Suriname again since I left. But the mere whiff of someone else’s secondhand smoke can still stir up the memories, and suddenly, it is 1990 again: I am walking past the house of the former wife of a ruthless dictator … and wondering if I will ever live to smoke another cigarette.

* * * * * *

Map of Suriname. Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

In the spring of 1990, before I left Paramaribo, I attended the open-casket “funeral” of a high-raking Soviet diplomat—in retrospect, one wonders why a soon-to-be-dissolved empire would have squandered its dwindling resources in such a crazy place. All the small country’s diplomats—that is, the few of us Western nations who still bothered to keep up appearances—were requested to attend, and in rare sympathy with official Soviet policy, even under Mikhail Gorbachev, we complied. I did not know the man, but “showed the flag,” nonetheless.

The victim, Stasys Obukauskas, a 41-year-old second secretary at the Soviet embassy, had been hijacked in his Mercedes on the way to Zanderij airport, about 30 miles outside the city, an hour by car, at night—despite the ongoing “revolution” and armed bandits (“Upheaval in the East: Soviet Diplomat Found Slain by a Main Road in Suriname,” New York Times, April 11, 1990).

Hard as it was to get accurate, verifiable information out of the government, we soon learned he was shot and dumped in a roadside ditch, but did not die immediately. His second mistake—driving out to Zanderij alone, by day, was unwise at best; at night it was unforgivably stupid—was to raise his head out of that ditch before his stolen Mercedes was out of sight. Predictably, the assailants saw him, came back and shot him in the head this time, to make sure he could not identify them.

But the three thugs—by all reports, former military grunts, perhaps having sampled some of Bouterse’s “sugar”—were soon apprehended, not fathoming their colossal error of trying to sell a stolen Mercedes in a broken-down country where expensive cars were hard enough to repair, and the diplomatic plates, without official documentation, even harder to explain.

Fast forward to the funeral—more precisely, a kind of “wake,” Soviet-style, but without vodka. A long line of “mourners”—including a pregnant friend of mine, who knew the victim socially—were required upon arrival to file past the open casket. Unlike Lenin, our erstwhile colleague had not been embalmed well or prettied up—and the relentless tropical heat had done no favors to his decaying body. The Soviets were making an ominous statement, I gathered—to the hapless Surinamese government, to the deranged Bouterse, whose followers may have been involved, to anyone who would listen. Drawing a line in the tropical mud: no further, y’all. Most of us instantly gagged and got out of there.

The three assailants were soon arrested in the next-over city from Guyana, Nieuw Nickerie, where they were charged, and taken to police headquarters in Paramaribo, where they were held for trial. But the wheels of justice turn slowly in Suriname. By the time I left six months later, we had lost track of them; probably released, or maybe killed by other criminals in jail, or out.

A few months later, another “friend of Desi” was arrested for a somewhat less internationally significant infraction, if held only briefly—until at 1 a.m. a few nights later, when the forces of darkness ordered his immediate release, and then, with no real warning, began firing artillery shells at the police headquarters. The sounds awoke me and my wife. We thought we were in a war zone.

All that starts badly does not, however, always get worse—sometimes it stays bad but just ends quietly, with cowardly acquiescence to violence or the threats of violence. The miscreant was duly handed over by the police—to whatever reward or punishment the dictator devised. Within months, I left Suriname forever, and never really looked back. Even that Christmas, when the government was overthrown in what was later called a “telephone coup,” and Bouterse came back into power. Twenty years later, he was president.

Living in Suriname was like living on the other side of Alice’s looking glass. Once you’re come back through, it is not worth trying to look back or try to make sense of it …

Next time: History has a way of reminding you about what may come again …