Racially charged violence claims lives in Suriname

A murder on Christmas Eve sparked vicious riots in the Surinamese town of Albina. Locals took to the streets battering, raping and even killing Brazilian and Chinese immigrants.

Police and army offers patrolled the abandoned streets of the Suriname border town of Albina. Burnt out cars, a hotel lying in ruins, and looted shops bore silent witness to the bloody riots the town experienced this Christmas.

Wide spread violence raged through the town after a dispute between an Albina man locally acknowledged as a criminal and a Brazilian prospector escalated on Christmas Eve. The local man, who died of wound inflicted during a knife-fight, was the first of an unconfirmed eight deadly victims over the weekend.

Albina is a town of several thousand souls, located on the west bank of the Maroni River, which marks the border between Suriname and French Guyana. It is home to a native population of mostly maroon people, descendants of runaway African slaves brought to Suriname long ago by Dutch traders.

After the killing, hundreds of locals maroons took to Albina’s streets, wielding axes and other weapons. They directed their aggression at the Brazilians and other foreigners living in their town, including Chinese shop owners. Thirteen people were injured and twenty Brazilian women were raped and battered.

“This stuff recalls the Rwandan genocide. And it is happening right here in our own beautiful Suriname,” a radio reporter cried out during a broadcast. “Emotions are running rampant and the authorities are nowhere to be seen,” the reporter said.

Public response to the riots was one of shock, but the events could hardly have come as a complete surprise. Albina has long been a hotbed of unrest, violence, and lawlessness. Still, no one had expected that the usually so peaceful nation of Suriname would be facing a Christmas marked by murder, violence and rape.

The Dutch teacher Hugo den Boer, who has been living in Albina for ten years, witnessed how his home town was plundered.

“I saw people I know, nice neighbourly people, suddenly running around with axes, trashing everything in sight,” Den Boer said. “I took a little group of raped Brazilian women who had totally lost it to the police to report the crime. A good acquaintance of mine, a Chinese man, had his shop looted and destroyed. This man never hurt a fly and now he has lost everything. He was only targeted because his business is doing well.”

The teacher even saw government officials and housewives roam the shops, looking for valuables to loot. “Things can apparently turn to total anarchy in a split second,” Den Boer said.

That the violence was directed at foreigners, mostly Brazilians and Chinese, seems to indicate a deep-seated frustration that has taken hold of the maroon population. These locals feel the new inhabitants of their native lands are taking advantage of their resources and flouting local laws.

The violence is also an indirect consequence of the bloody civil war waged here in the 1980s, out in the jungle, between the former military junta of Desi Bouterse and rebels led by self-styled ‘jungle commando’ Ronny Brunswijk. A whole generation was raised in violence, leading to rampant unemployment, alcohol and substance abuse and creating droves of social dropouts.

Albina, once a popular holiday destination which the jet set nicknamed the Surinamese Riviera, was blasted to bits during that war and never completely restored.

The arrival of large groups of Chinese entrepreneurs and thousands of Brazilian prospectors who have successfully mined Lawa, an area rich in gold, created a tense atmosphere in Albina. The Brazilian gold mines are regularly robbed by maroon stick-up artists. As the price of gold went up recently, so did the number of robberies.

The man stabbed to death this Christmas was publicly recognised a recurrent robber of gold mines. The Surinamese national government, based some 300 kilometres away in the country’s capital Paramaribo, has remained completely apathetic to the events in the eastern far reaches of the county. “Politicians in Paramaribo have never invested in this region. The school I teach at has classes of 40 students, even though many of them already have learning disadvantages. There is no day-care, no kindergarten. The government has lost all authority in the outer regions of Suriname,” Den Boer said.

During prior times of unrest in the region surrounding Albina, president Ronald Venetiaan asked former rebel leader and native of the region Ronny Brunswijk to restore order to the area. Brunswijk, who now leads the largest maroon party in parliament, should keep a handle on his own people, the president said.

Brunswijk, however, does little to lead by example. This year he was allegedly involved in a number of shootouts and he physically abused an employee of the utility company because he felt he was overcharged.

“As long as people like Brunswijk are supposed to be role models and are worshipped by the population, we are fighting a battle we can’t win,” Den Boer said.