This article was downloaded by: [Washington & Lee University] On: 19 June 2013, At: 03:20 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Ethnic and Racial Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers20 Dogla politics? Questioning ethnic consociationalism in Suriname's national elections of 25 May 2010 Iris Marchand Published online: 10 Sep 2012. To cite this article: Iris Marchand (2012): Dogla politics? Questioning ethnic consociationalism in Suriname's national elections of 25 May 2010, Ethnic and Racial Studies, DOI:10.1080/01419870.2012.720692 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2012.720692 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
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This article was downloaded by: [Washington & Lee University]On: 19 June 2013, At: 03:20Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
Ethnic and Racial StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers20
Dogla politics? Questioningethnic consociationalism inSuriname's national elections of25 May 2010Iris MarchandPublished online: 10 Sep 2012.
To cite this article: Iris Marchand (2012): Dogla politics? Questioning ethnicconsociationalism in Suriname's national elections of 25 May 2010, Ethnic and RacialStudies, DOI:10.1080/01419870.2012.720692
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2012.720692
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make anyrepresentation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up todate. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should beindependently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liablefor any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damageswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith or arising out of the use of this material.
(First submission July 2011; First published September 2012)
Abstract1
This paper asks to what extent Suriname’s consociational democracy stillrests on its historically shaped meta-ideology of ethnic essentialism.Based on ethnographic data of the country’s national elections in 2010,I suggest that the ‘ethnic taboo’ of ethnic mobilization by politicians waspresent to a certain extent. However, this taboo was challenged by thenationalist turn of Desi Bouterse’s National Democratic Party. Further-more, when considering voting behaviour and that of ethnically mixedDoglas in particular, we see that Surinamese politics is more complex.I will argue that while we have been thinking about Surinamese politics asbeing on a par with ethnic groupings, these 2010 elections were not simplyabout ethnicity. Ethnicity may have informed but did not fully explainpeople’s political choices, because people are too complex to be capturedin an exclusively ethnic category, and because the Surinamese politicalsystem is too complex to maintain clear ethnic categories.
On the national election day of 25 May 2010, the Surinamese town ofNieuw Nickerie had the atmosphere of a public holiday, with manypeople on the street, laughing, joking and waving flags. This apparentjoy turned more festive towards the end of the day when the electionresults were becoming clearer. Kishen, one of my respondents, washappy. The Mega-Combination, led by the National DemocraticParty (NDP), had achieved victory in Nickerie by getting three of the
Ethnic and Racial Studies 2012 pp. 1�21, iFirst Article
# 2012 Taylor & FrancisISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 onlinehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2012.720692
five parliamentary seats for the district. On the day Kishen drovearound Nickerie with the flag of the NDP tied to his car windows,as many of his friends did, see Figure 1. His ink-marked fingertipindicated that he had cast his vote.
This paper asks to what extent Suriname’s current political system isstill a consociational democracy based on a historically shaped meta-ideology of ethnic essentialism. Consociationalism is the guidingpolitical theory to understand coalition making in Suriname since the1960s. In the Netherlands the term ‘consociationalism’ � verzuiling inDutch � referred to the post-war religious divisions between Protestantand Roman Catholic citizens and to the twentieth-century politicalblock forming of combining a Protestant ‘pillar’, a Roman Catholic‘pillar’, a liberal ‘pillar’ and a social democrat ‘pillar in the government(Lijphart 1968; Stuurman 1983). Suriname’s consociationalism is anethnic ‘pillarization’ based on the apanjaht ideology, according to whichboth the mobilization of the electorate by the political parties and thevoting behaviour of the electorate are ethnically biased.
Like Kishen, who I opened this paper with, most of my ethnicallymixed Dogla respondents voted for the NDP. Why did they? Whatwere the reasons for their overwhelming support for Desi Bouterse’sparty? Was it because of the NDP’s supposed non-ethnic politics? Why
Figure 1 Nickerie 25 May 2010
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was this nationalist party with its foundations in the militarydictatorship of the 1980s apparently more popular than the ethnic‘cake of custom’ (cf. Park 1928) parties that were historically the mostpowerful democratic actors of Surinamese politics? Were Suriname’selections of 25 May 2010 about ethnicity?
The ethnographic data obtained during my anthropological field-work in the district of Nickerie in the northwest of Suriname, showthat ethnic mobilization was present to a certain extent in the run-upto these elections. However, my data of the voting behaviour of theNickerians and Doglas in particular suggest that Surinamese politics ismore complex than apanjaht. Ethnicity may have informed but did notfully explain people’s political choices, because both their daily life andSuriname’s current political system concern more than ethnicity.
Based on the population census of 2004, the western district ofNickerie had, according to the Surinamese Bureau of Statistics, 36,639citizens, or 7.43 per cent of Suriname’s total population of 492,829(ABS 2005). The fieldwork period comprised fifteen months, fromApril 2009 to July 2010, and focused on various aspects of multiethnicDogla and pan-ethnic social identities and belonging. The term Dogla,as I will explain below, generally refers to people with mixed Afro-Asian ancestry. During my fieldwork, statistical data on the number ofDoglas in Nickerie was not available because the 2004 census had notlisted ‘Dogla’ as an ethnic category and the category ‘mixed’ maycontain many more people than Doglas given the wide variety ofgeographical origins of Suriname’s current citizens.
Suriname’s Amerindians are descendents of the inhabitants of theAmericas living there long before Europeans arrived. Creoles andMaroons are descendents of Suriname’s formerly enslaved Africanpopulation. The term Maroon refers to a descendant of the ‘runawayslaves’ who settled in the country’s interior in the eighteenth century.The term Creole evolved from denoting the mixed offspring of formerplantation slaves and white planters to a new ethnic category; theSurinamese use the term Creole to address descendants of former slavesthat are not Maroon, whether mixed or not. Hindustanis and Javaneseare descendents of Suriname’s former indentured labourers from Indiaand Indonesia, respectively. Apart from these main ethnic groups thereare various other numerically significant citizens such as (pre- and post-colonial) Chinese groups, Lebanese, Brazilians, Guyanese and Dutch.
For structural clarity I will start this paper by giving an overview ofSuriname’s colonial politics and post-independence developmentsbecause an understanding of the current political situation isincomplete when removed from the country’s historical legacy. Second,I will focus on how political parties mobilized their voters in the run-up to Suriname’s elections of 25 May 2010. The subsequent section isconcerned with voting behaviour in Nickerie, with an emphasis on
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Dogla voting behaviour. I will conclude with questioning the idea ofethnic consociationalism in Suriname’s current political system.
Surinamese politics: a historical overview
Colonial politics
Suriname’s first comprehensive set of constitutional regulations waslaunched with the Octrooi (Charter) of 2 September 1682. Under thisearly charter there were no political parties but a form of rule by acolonial council. The lack of public political participation started tochange when the Netherlands became a kingdom in 1813. Followingmajor revisions of the Dutch constitution, the Surinamese colonywas granted limited democracy and partial economic autonomy(Fernandez Mendez 2001; Hoefte 2001; Ramsoedh 2001).
The Dutch authorities nevertheless long continued to retaindominance over Suriname. In the nineteenth century they started anassimilation or ‘Dutchification’ policy. From 1869 bureaucraticprinciples were modelled on those of the Netherlands, education wasmade compulsory for children aged between seven and twelve, and in1876 Dutch became the official language. This ‘civilizing’ policy,however, was only directed at the light-skinned Creole middle class inParamaribo, and when the census-based right to vote was lowered in1901 from Dutch-elite only to a more public democracy, it was onlythe light-skinned Creole middle class that benefited by being allowedto set up electoral associations. The dark-skinned Creole working classand the Hindustani and Javanese remained politically excluded(Helman 1982; Hoefte 2001; Ramsoedh 2001).
The ethnically selective Dutchification policy widened the culturalgap between the light-skinned Creoles and the other populationgroups. This gap grew larger still during the administration ofGovernor Kielstra between 1933 and 1944. Kielstra granted theHindustani and Javanese relative autonomy in running their agricul-tural villages and rights to marry according to their own culturalprinciples. Kielstra was resented by the Creole elite for allowing ‘Asianlaws’, and when he also involved Hindustani and Javanese ingovernmental decisions and allowed them to take up positions inparliament, this resentment was increasingly directed also towards theAsians (Budike and Mungra 1986; Meel 2001).
The 1940s marked significant political change. Shortly after theSecond World War, in 1946, Suriname’s first political parties were setup and in 1948 universal suffrage was introduced. With the acceptanceof the Statuut (Statute) in 1954, the Surinamese authorities startedto run their own internal affairs, although there was still a governorrepresenting the Dutch crown and the Netherlands remained
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responsible for international relations and defence (Helman 1982;Khemradj 2002).
These first political parties were ‘based on ethnic and religiousaffiliation, [which] led to a mass politicisation and an intensificationof the segmentation of Surinamese society. Segmentation provedstronger than the programmes and objectives of the political parties’(Ramsoedh 2001, p. 95). This ethnic compartmentalization is in theCaribbean literature referred to as a form of consociationalism calledapanjaht, which is ‘the practice of ethnically based political partiesplaying upon prejudice, fear, and/or communal interests to gainsupport’ (Dew 1993, p. 65), and involves ‘voting for your own race,your own kind’ (Dew, cited in MacDonald 1988, p. 107; see also Dew1978; Sedney 1997; St-Hilaire 2001).
The domination of the light-skinned Creoles in the running ofnational affairs waned when a dark-skinned member of the NationalePartij Suriname (National Party Suriname, NPS), Johan Adolf Pengel,demanded more rights for the Creole working class. This initiated aninteresting rearrangement of the political constellation: Pengel foundan ally in Jagernath Lachmon, the leader of the Verenigde Hindos-taanse Partij (United Hindustani Party, VHP).2 In 1958 a Creole�Hindustani alliance led by Pengel and Lachmon was formed, andfive years later was joined by the Javanese Kaum Tani PersuatanIndonesia (Indonesian Peasants Party, KTPI). This multiethnicalliance is nowadays referred to as the Surinamese period offraternization politics. Lachmon himself explained in an interviewwith Roy Khemradj: ‘In Suriname one ethnic group cannot rule thecountry alone. This is why the idea of fraternization politics emerged’(Khemradj 2002, p. 33, author’s translation from Dutch original).
Despite the political cooperation of Lachmon and Pengel, someobservers noted an intensification of ethnic rivalry between the alliedparties. According to Hans Ramsoedh (2001), this rivalry was fuelledby an increased emancipation and urbanization of the Hindustanipopulation. Furthermore, the NPS and VHP continued to disagree onthe question of Suriname’s independence from the Netherlands. TheCreoles had increasingly been voting pro-independence, while theHindustani feared a return to political Creole dominance and the riskof losing their favourable (agri)cultural rights granted by the colony.These issues all added up to the break of this political fraternization(Ramsoedh 2001).
In 1967, following a decade of NPS�VHP cooperation, Pengelformed an NPS cabinet with the VHP in the opposition. When Pengeldied three years later the VHP returned to government, but in 1973 theNPS, then led by Henck Arron, took over again and did not wait longto announce Suriname’s colonial independence (Khemradj 2002). Notall Surinamese citizens, most notably those of Asian and (other)
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working-class backgrounds, were thrilled with the prospect of in-dependence. Before Suriname’s official independence on 25 November1975, thousands of people fled to the Netherlands. Nevertheless, theNPS received agreement from the then left-wing Den Uyl adminis-tration in the Netherlands and the opposing Surinamese parties werebribed with a golden handshake of 3,500 million Dutch guilders(US$1,700 million) for the country’s development (Helman 1982;Ramsoedh 2001, p. 101).
Post-independence developments
Not long after independence, Suriname’s democracy was nullified.With the country’s deteriorating economy and anger with thepersistent interferences from the Netherlands, Suriname’s NationalArmy carried out a coup d’etat in February 1980. On 13 May 1980,then Sergeant Desi Bouterse claimed power over the country, declaringmartial law. Bouterse announced an anti-colonial revolution along thelines of Fidel Castro’s Cuba (Fernandez Mendez 2001; Ramsoedh2001; Khemradj 2002).
During the military period the Surinamese population suffered fromviolence and repression. On 8 December 1982, Bouterse was im-plicated in the arrest and subsequent torture and alleged execution offifteen prominent intellectuals and unionists opposing the revolution.This act is commonly known as the ‘December murders’ (Ramsoedh2001; Hoogbergen and Kruijt 2006, p. 188). Bouterse’s operationSchoon Schip (Clean Sweep) in 1983 expelled around 5,000 Guyaneseand Haitian workers from Suriname ‘to protect the Surinamese labourmarket and guarantee national security’ (Meel 2001, p. 143).Furthermore, while Dutch development aid had been withdrawnfollowing Bouterse’s military coup, the country’s economy informa-lized taking revenues from involvement in the international cocainetrade and ‘a booming black market’ (Price 1995, p. 445; Haenen 1999).
In 1987, Bouterse agreed to the formation of a new civil constitutionmodelled on that of 1975. On 25 November 1987, free elections wereheld and with a combined victory of forty-eight of the fifty-one seatsthe VHP, the NPS and the KTPI returned to government, now as amultiethnic coalition called the Front. Bouterse’s newly initiated party,the NDP, got the remaining three seats (Khemradj 2002).
The fear for Bouterse’s military power, however, remained strong.Two years before the 1987 elections, a Maroon jungle commando ledby Bouterse’s former army recruit Ronnie Brunswijk had startedguerrilla raids seeking to overpower Bouterse’s National Army, towhich Bouterse responded by mobilizing the army to the largelyMaroon Moengo district in Eastern Suriname. This initiated a six-yearlong internal war in which also Amerindians from the country’s
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interior were involved. Killings, tortures, the destroying of Maroonvillages and the overall violent chaos in these years caused thousandsof Maroons to migrate to neighbouring French Guiana. The fear ofBouterse, also among politicians, was demonstrated most explicitly bythe ‘telephone coup’: in December 1990, Bouterse called the cabinetand said that the elected President Shankar (VHP) could not governand he pushed forward NDP member Jules Wijdenbosch as the newPresident (Price 1995; Ramsoedh 2001; Khemradj 2002; Hoogbergenand Kruijt 2006).
Following this non-democratic move within the government, theSurinamese electorate was to vote again on 25 May 1991, resulting inthe first government of President Ronald Venetiaan (NPS, 1991�96)with Lachmon chairing the cabinet. With the Surinaamse Partij van deArbeid (Surinamese Labour Party, SPA) joining the coalition in 1991,they renamed the Front the Nieuw Front (New Front) (Khemradj2002). In the following government (1996�2000) however, the NewFront returned to the opposition seats against former ally KTPI, nowin coalition with the stronger-growing NDP. During this periodSuriname suffered a big economic crisis, with inflation towering high(Khemradj 2002; Ramsoedh 2008). The reluctance of Wijdenbosch toresign, despite popular protests and a majority of votes from theparliament, caused a constitutional crisis in 1999 about who had thehighest power: the president or the cabinet?
With the initiation of independence in 1975, Suriname had drafted aconstitution in which a cabinet of ministers called De NationaleAssemblee (The National Assembly, DNA), chaired by a voorzitter(chairman), had the highest legislative power. In 1987, the parliamen-tary democracy had changed into an odd and confusing dual politicalsystem that kept the cabinet plus its chairman, yet with the additionthat the previously largely symbolic function of the president (electedby the cabinet) was granted more legally decisive power (FernandezMendez 2001).
Wijdenbosch nevertheless saw his presidential period ending undermassive protests from the Surinamese population, and in May 2000the New Front won the elections (Khemradj 2002). During Venetiaan’ssecond term (2000�05), with Lachmon and Ram Sardjoe chairing thecabinet, Suriname experienced slow economic recovery and monetarystability, but promises regarding constitutional changes were notrealized.3 Following the elections in May 2005, NPS candidateVenetiaan nevertheless resumed his position as the country’s presidentfor a five-year period (Venetiaan III), this time with the JavanesePertjaja Luhur (PL) leader Paul Somohardjo as the cabinet’s chairman,who had joined the New Front coalition in 2000.
In the run-up to the 2010 elections there was a busy-bee atmosphere,closely followed by the local newspapers, of strategic block forming
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and de-forming. One of the changes among the many fissions andfusions within and between party combinations was the PL leaving theNew Front for Somohardjo’s newly established Volksalliantie (People’sAlliance). The 2010 elections eventually listed twenty-one parties ofwhich four were independent and the others allied in five coalitions.Next I will turn to how these parties presented themselves to theSurinamese electorate.
The ethnic taboo during the elections of 25 May 2010
Investigating the role of ethnicity and nationalism during the country’sprevious elections of May 2005, Anne Blanksma (2006) observed whathe called the ethnic taboo in Surinamese politics. This taboo refers tothe occurrence of ethnic mobilization while politicians denied thatthey were doing so. Explicit ethnic favouritism could imply that theydid not possess national loyalty. The saying ‘vote for people that looklike you’, coined by Somohardjo (PL), was repeated during severalparty meetings. According to Blanksma, following negative critiquesparties no longer openly phrased it, yet during party rallies ethnicitywas sometimes explicitly addressed.
The months prior to the May 2010 elections showed a recurrence ofthis ethnic taboo, in that many political parties still appeared tooperate along ethnic lines while denying that they were doing so.Although the idea of apanjaht seems outdated as I did not witnesspoliticians playing upon fear, elements of ethnic prejudice were evidentin the mobilization strategies of many parties. The closer the day of theelection approached, the more politicians seemed to forget theirannounced dissatisfaction with an ethnicized voting system.
Ethnic mobilization of voters occurred in several ways. For instance,the ethnic taboo was played out by the language that some politiciansused. While presenting ‘neutral’ mobilization strategies such astreating everyone, regardless of ethnic background, to free meals, insome of his campaigns Somohardjo again referred to ‘people who looklike you’. Furthermore, the PL’s slogan ‘from ethnic party to nationalparty’ lost credibility when it was strategically counting the number ofJavanese in our and other neighbourhoods in Nickerie before decidingwhether to campaign there or not.
The A-combination did not hide its primary interest in theeconomic and emancipatory advancement and empowerment ofSuriname’s Maroons.4 It stressed that particular socio-economicattention to the Maroons was needed because they had been politicallymarginalized by previous governments. Similarly, or perhaps inresponse to one another, some members of the NPS warned againsttoo much participation of the A-combination in the government
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because of its explicit Maroon loyalty and presumed lack of politicalexperience.
Also where politicians were not explicit in their language, ethnicfavouritism could be discerned in some of their actions, such as that itwas suddenly important to the VHP to push through the paving of theroads in largely Hindustani residential areas of Nickerie, noticeably‘forgetting’ the roads where mostly Creoles resided. Regardless of thelanguage that politicians used, actions such as these had a stronginfluence on people’s voting decisions. One of the most effectivestrategies in Nickerie seemed to be a politician’s ‘free gifts’, such aspromising people agricultural property or the legalization of landownership, in the hope that these promises would then be returned bya willingness to curry party support.
Another strategy of politicians was to focus their campaigns oncertain districts in which they expected more (ethnic) party supportthan in others. One of the curious characteristics of the Surinamesevoting system is the skewed ratio between the number of elective seatsand the number of voters per district. The number of seats per districtdates from the 1940s when Suriname’s population distribution wasvery different. Since then many people have moved from outer districtsto the capital of Paramaribo and the surrounding districts of GreaterParamaribo and Wanica. In 2004, roughly 250,000 or half of theSurinamese population resided in the capital (ABS 2005); yet therewere only seventeen politicians, or 33 per cent of the fifty-oneparliamentary seats, to be elected there. The contrast on the otherend of the scale was the district of Coronie where two politicians, oralmost 4 per cent of all seats, were to be elected by only 0.6 per cent ofthe population. Hence the value of a vote depended on the district,causing many politicians to campaign in ‘easy’ districts such asCoronie, Marowijne and Sipaliwini. (Although massive VHP cam-paigns in Maroon areas or Algemene Bevrijdings- en OntwikkelingsPartij (General Liberation and Development Party, ABOP) rallies inNickerie were unlikely.)
The campaigns of the NDP, who claimed victory following the 2010elections, differed from the overall ethnically inspired mobilization ofthe Surinamese electorate because of its nationalist approach, findingits roots in a historically grown antagonism against the formercolonizer, the Netherlands. In his analysis of the elections in 2005,Blanksma (2006) noted that the NDP’s speeches were strongly againstthe neocolonial influence of the Netherlands. Bouterse accused theNew Front of ‘begging’ from the Netherlands, which preventedSuriname from acquiring real independence.
In his campaigns in the run-up to the 2010 elections, Boutersecontinued his nationalist approach. In sweeping speeches he arguedthat the ethnicization of Surinamese politics originated in a colonial
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strategy of the Dutch to stress the population’s ethnic segmentation tokeep its political leaders weak and dependent, and he repeatedlyreferred to the Netherlands as an enemy to all Surinamese because itwas preventing national unity. This nationalist argument is historicallygrounded. It is likely that the explicitly ethnic ‘divide-and-rule’ politicswas a reason why Suriname’s independence was not marked by aMarxist-oriented drive for independence, as happened in other formercolonies such as Indonesia. Furthermore, this divide-and-rule legacyhas also long been penetrating Suriname’s post-colonial politicalthinking, with its most influential actors maintaining these divides.
Bouterse’s nationalist rhetoric in the elections of 2005 and 2010challenged the previously dominant ethnic configurations, or, perhapsmore to the point, it explicitly exposed these. In that regard, thepresumed ethnic taboo on ethnic mobilization was hardly a taboo.Actually, this taboo has been a crucial mobilization move revealinghow ethnic identity versus identity more generally has been shaped inSuriname and how this paradox is played by Suriname’s politicalactors. Although in his speeches Bouterse synthesized several culturalstreams, he did not use the term ‘Dogla’, nor did he explicitly celebratemixed individuals over members of essentialized ethnic groups.Nevertheless, the seduction of political rejuvenation and social changemediated by the NDP did foreground a questioning of the ethniccompartmentalization of Surinamese politics.
Following the elections of 25 May 2010, Suriname’s fifty-oneparliamentary seats were distributed as follows: twenty-three seatswere for the Mega Combination (with Bouterse’s NDP); fourteenfor the New Front (with the NPS and the VHP); seven for theA-Combination (with Brunswijk’s ABOP); six for the People’sAlliance (with Somohardjo’s PL); and the remaining seat was forCarl Breeveld’s independent party Democratie door Ontwikkeling enEenheid (Democracy through Development and Unity, DOE).
The Mega-Combination thus needed an additional three seats toachieve the minimum majority of twenty-six seats to form a govern-ment. The New Front would need an additional twelve, which couldhave been achieved by agreeing to cooperate with the A-Combinationand the People’s Alliance. A government of Bouterse with the NewFront was effectively beyond negotiation. Eventually, a couple ofmonths of stormy discussions across all parties eventually resulted in agovernment of the Mega-Combination with the A-Combination.Following these results, a majority of the newly elected Surinameseparliament (DNA) voted for Bouterse’s presidency.
Because of the salience of ethnicity in Surinamese politics, formerdictator Bouterse, the country’s current president, is one of the mostinteresting figures in Surinamese politics since the country’s indepen-dence in 1975, not least because he is probably also the most
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controversial. Given the country’s history of the internal war it seemsparticularly ironic that following the results of the 2010 elections, it isthe Maroon A-Combination that Bouterse agreed to form a govern-ment with. Of interest here, however, is how in 2010 Bouterse managedto become Suriname’s democratically elected president despite thesweeping (inter)national accusations of his military and cocaine-business behaviour.
In the following section I will present ethnographic information onvoting behaviour in Nickerie.
Voting behaviour in Nickerie on 25 May 2010
In Nickerie there were five of the country’s fifty-one seats to beelected. Following the final counts it was announced that the Mega-Combination had won three seats and the other two seats were for theNew Front and the People’s Alliance. It was only the Hindustanicandidate Lekhram Soerdjan of the VHP, number five on the NewFront list, who had been elected through preferential votes.
One reason for the apparent popularity of Soerdjan in Nickeriecould be that he is Hindustani in a predominantly Hindustani district.5
A similar apanjaht speculation would be that the Javanese PLcandidate Soetimin Marsidih, number one on the People’s Alliancelist, obtained his seat through Javanese voters in the district. However,let us also take a look at the candidates listed by the Mega-Combination before jumping to conclusions as to whether theNickerians voted ethnically or not.
According to electro-technician and tennis trainer Dan Tjon TjauwLiem, the NDP, despite its non-ethnic approach, nevertheless allowedthe Surinamese electorate to vote ethnically:
The first candidate on the list of Mega-Combination was MohamedDoekhie, a Hindustani from the NDP. Second came PremdewLachman, a Hindustani from Nieuw Suriname (New Suriname, NS),third Refano Wongsoredjo, a Javanese from the KTPI, fourth ErwinMilton Abel, a Creole from the NDP, and fifth Harriet Ramdien, aHindustani woman from the NDP. The voting advice of the NDPwas: ‘‘vote Abel’’, which was a non-ethnic move because Abel isCreole. However, people did not vote for Abel, because the threeseats for the Mega-Combination went to Doekhie, Lachman andWongsoredjo. This shows you that the Nickerian people still votedethnically.6 (Interview, 29 May 2010)
This analysis and subsequent conclusion that ‘the Nickerian peoplestill voted ethnically’ even within a party block dominated by the
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non-ethnic NDP, was echoed by several other local observers whom Ispoke to both in Nickerie and in Paramaribo.
However, a closer analysis of the election results in Nickerie shows amore complex picture. As I will show below, many people did vote forAbel. According to the statistics, Abel even got more votes than theNDP’s other two candidates, ‘despite’ him being Creole and the othertwo candidates Hindustani (Table 1).
As Table 1 shows, the total number of votes for NDP in Nickeriewas 1,966 (Doekhie)�2,210 (Abel)�1,569 (Ramdien) �5,745, oralmost 32 per cent of all Nickerie’s 18,062 votes. That the NDP onlygot one of the district’s five seats is due to the odd way in which thevotes are distributed over the seats in the Surinamese system. However,this result raises the question of whether the NDP could have achievedvictories in Nickerie if it had not allied with the KTPI and the NS inthese elections. Overall, it exposes the insecurity of inter-party blockpolitics both for politicians and for voters, as the number of votes for aparty member does not guarantee a statistically equivalent chance ofgetting a parliamentary seat.
When we look at the votes specifically for the listed NDP members,we see that the Nickerians did follow the NDP’s advice to vote forAbel. If Abel had got a few hundred more votes, he would have won aseat through preferential votes like Soerdjan of the VHP (who camethrough with 2,755 votes). Likewise, Abel would have been entitled toa seat as well if he had been placed as number three rather than four onthe list. Furthermore, if Lachman had been placed at number four, hewould not have got his seat despite receiving most votes. As none ofthe Mega-Combination candidates won enough preferential votes, theexcess votes from down the list were added to number one on the list,and when Doekhie’s count reached the quota, the remaining excessvotes then dripped down to numbers two and three.
The victory for Premdew Lachman from NS was remarkablebecause on a countrywide scale NS support was minor. Again, thismight be an indication that at least the Hindustani Nickerians were
Table 1. Number of votes for the candidates listed for the Mega-Combination inNickerie
List position Name Party Votes
1 Doekhie, Mohamed R. NDP 1,9662 Lachman, Premdew NS 2,2353 Wongsoredjo, Refano B. KTPI 9104 Abel, Erwin Milton NDP 2,2105 Ramdien, Harriet S. NDP 1,569Total 8,890
Source: Nickerie.Net/NSS 2010
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voting ethnically. Yet, how do we know that it was Hindustanis votingfor Lachman? And if this were the case, then why did they preferLachman rather than a Hindustani candidate of one of the biggerparties?
Some people who voted for Lachman told me that they hadprimarily voted for the party rather than the candidate. Robert, aCreole waiter, said he held hopes for the NS to grow more meaningfulin Suriname’s democracy. Other respondents, however, seemed toconfuse the Mega-Combination with the NDP. Some of my Hindus-tani neighbours, for instance, said:
We do not like Doekhie so therefore we will vote number two on thelist. It does not matter which party we vote for anyway, because aslong as the Mega-Combination gets enough votes, the NDP will bein the government. We support the NDP so therefore we vote Mega-Combination. (Interview, 20 May 2010)
As the Mega-Combination did score well and the NDP did go intogovernment, my neighbours did not understand my suggestion that itwas party representatives rather than the combination that wouldultimately be in government. ‘What is unclear to you?’, they reasoned,‘We voted MC [Mega-Combination] and therefore the NDP is now inthe government’ (Interview, 27 May 2010).
Of all the people I spoke to the Javanese seemed the most ethnicallyoriented in their voting behaviour, with roughly half of them voting forthe PL and the other half for the KTPI. Waiting in the queue on 25May 2010 to cast her vote, Manuela, a primary school teacher, said: ‘Ifollow the bright star of Pertjaja . . . I am Christian so I see it as the starof Jesus.’ To which a Javanese man behind her in the queue responded:‘The KTPI has always guided us through day and night without starrybusiness!’
A Hindustani man working in one of the local shops said to me:
Of course I voted, but I will not tell anyone for whom. My advice forthis country is that if we want to get rid of the ethnic in our politicalsystem we, as voters, should never vote according to what politiciansexpect. If we can confuse their campaigns then they will need toreadjust their strategies and then we may finally get the parliamentwe want! (Interview, 5 May 2010)
Most other Hindustani people I spoke to, however, were not secretiveabout their political choice. Interestingly, their answers differedaccording to their residential location. When I ventured out intoCorantijn Polder and Clara Polder, two of the more orthodox Hinduparts of Nickerie, most people told me that they had voted for
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Soerdjan or Lachman ‘because we are Hindustani, we know them andthey know us’. The NDP generally was not met with great enthusiasmby them.
However, in the district town of Nieuw Nickerie and the poldersimmediately surrounding it � areas with more daily interactionbetween the ethnic groups � there was more support for the NDP.Although here Soerdjan of the VHP was also popular, he was closelyfollowed by Doekhie, Ramdien and Abel of the NDP; indeed, severalof my Hindustani respondents in the town said that they had voted forAbel ‘because he is a very skilful physician and a well-known man withmany friends, so he will make wise decisions benefiting all Nickerians’(Interviews, 11 and 12 May 2010). This suggests that not allHindustanis voted ethnically.
Some of the Creoles I spoke to said that they did not vote for Abelbecause they thought he had no chance of getting enough votes in adistrict such as Nickerie. While lazing in the hammocks under theirhouse, friends Eddie, Glenn and Rosia rather lethargically said:
Hindustani and Javanese people will not vote for Abel because he isCreole. We will not vote for Abel because we do not support theNDP. With Bouterse we’ll be getting economic troubles. But we willnot vote anyway because the New Front never changes anything, thePL makes no sense, and the SPA has been a mess. We do not believein politics. (Interview, 11 May 2010)
However, most other Creoles told me that they had voted for Abel,expressing their support for the NDP, although some said that theyhad preferred the continuation of the New Front and therefore votedfor the NPS or the SPA.
Now whom were Doglas voting for in 2010? Many months before theelections, Dogla and NPS member Carmelita Ferreira, herself numbertwo on the New Front list, had given me the following prognosis:
Suriname’s New Front leaders are old. They have been in thegovernment for a long time. When the old leaders have retired,Suriname will become more of a unity, sharing a single flag, becausethe youth does not emphasize ethnic divisions. Look, these boys thatI will have a meeting with shortly are Javanese and Hindustanijoining our so-called ‘‘negro-party’’ NPS, which as you can see ismulti-ethnic and therefore of interest also to Doglas. (Interview, 23September 2009)
Was the NPS of interest to Doglas? If so, then why did the majority ofmy Dogla informants tell me that they voted for Bouterse’s NDP?According to them the main reason not to vote for the NPS was, as
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Ferreira had said, that the New Front government was seen as havingbeen in power long enough. To quote Jordan, a biology student:‘Nothing in this country will ever change if we stick eternally tofraternizing alliances based on ethnic exclusivity’ (Interview, 5 May2010). Or, as my Hindustani friend Varsha phrased it: ‘Some peoplesay that Venetiaan has ten clean fingers because he has not mademistakes in his position as Suriname’s president. Others say that he hasten clean fingers because he did not change anything’ (Interview, 8June 2010).
Apart from an ‘age problem’ of the New Front politicians, there wasalso a difference between Doglas who had and those who had not beenaffected by the military dictatorship of the 1980s. Most of the young,adolescent Doglas whom I spoke to voted for the NDP mainly becauseof its nationalist approach. Bianca, for example, a nurse at theNickerie hospital, said: ‘I cannot vote for an ethnic party because I amDogla. I will vote for the NDP because they are stressing Surinameseunity’ (Interview, 5 May 2010). Stan, a young worker at Suriname’stelephone company Telesur, was even more explicit: ‘With Bouterse wewill become a Dogla land, no more race issues, everyone impure likeme, everyone Surinamese!’ (Interview, 5 May 2010).
Some older Doglas, however, expressed reservations against theNDP. According to Patrick, a retired school teacher, for example:
Young people do not realize how difficult the military period was.They don’t have memories of the curfews. We were not allowed togather on the street with more than four persons. One onion had tolast weeks for the whole family. There was nothing in the shops.Now we can buy everything. They just take that for granted, theyouth. My sister is scared that we will be punished for their youthfulinnocence. She voted for the NPS, in the hope that we could keepthe New Front, the democracy instead of the military. I didn’t knowwhat to do, what is best for this country. I did not vote. (Interview,26 May 2010)
Reasons for whom to vote or whether to vote at all, however, were notonly about history, of age, of ‘who you know’, of ethnic determinationversus nationalism, or of lethargic fatalism. Another prominent factorinfluencing the voting behaviour of many Nickerians was the societalimportance of political personae. This was most clearly visible whenrecalling Bouterse’s charismatic impression on the electorate despitehis stained biography. The Nickerie voters whom the NDP attracted inthe 2010 elections turned a blind eye towards the accusations againstparty leader Bouterse for murder and his alleged leading role inthe country’s international drugs trade. Several people I interviewedsaid that he did what he had to do because of ‘the circumstances’, or
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believed that he had changed his behaviour over the years. Bouterse’sdisplay of wittiness and charisma coupled with his promise of politicalchange appear to have helped the NDP’s success in 2010.
Dogla politics?
Suriname’s consociationalist system of multi-party block formingreflects the ambiguity between ethnic pluralism on the one hand andmore complex social interactions on the other. Many parties indivi-dually represented ethnic specificity, whereas the alliances they formedrequired inter-ethnic cooperation. In that sense Suriname’s partycombinations, and the New Front in particular, are a form of politicalDoglas.
What are Doglas? Whereas generally in the Caribbean the term‘dogla’ (or dougla) tends to refer to a person with a Creole and aHindustani parent, in Suriname a Dogla is more generally understoodto be an Afro-Asian moksi (mix), which can also include Javanese,Maroon, Amerindian and other ethnic elements. Positioned inbetween the ethnic groups that historically dominated Surinamesepolitics, Doglas could be ascribed a dual cultural personality, or seenas an outsider to one or to both of their parental groups, as ‘raceless’in a society where race is the communicative order of the day. Or,following sociologists from the Chicago school of American sociology,Doglas could be categorized as ‘marginal men’. This marginal man hasbeen defined by Robert Park (1928, p. 892) as:
a cultural hybrid, a man living and sharing intimately in the culturallife and traditions of two distinct peoples; never quite willing tobreak, even if he were permitted to do so, with his past and histraditions, and not quite accepted, because of racial prejudice, in thenew society in which he now sought to find a place. He was a manon the margin of two cultures and two societies which nevercompletely interpenetrated and fused.
However, I will not call Doglas marginal men because they are notnecessarily unstable, restless personality types, which is what Park(1931a, 1931b) and subsequent writers of the marginal man literature(e.g. see Stonequist 1937) have written about the mentality of marginalmen. Of course, some Doglas I spoke to expressed emotions aboutcultural belonging but most of them also felt proud and content withbeing Dogla. Others simply chose to call themselves Creole orJavanese. Besides, people from presumably pure ethnic groups werejust as likely to feel culturally unsettled, if not more so, with feelingstuck in their fixed ethnic background, unable to pass as another
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ethnic identity, and in some cases despised or even repudiated forattempting inter-ethnic sexual relationships.
Clearly, the Chicago school developed its marginal man theory in adifferent direction and my use of it here is only speculative. Furtherresearch could explore the adequacy of the marginal man concept inthe Caribbean context. For now, however, and confined to mydiscussion of Suriname’s national elections of 25 May 2010, I suggestthat Doglas are not as marginal as they may seem from a socio-psychological standpoint precisely because the Surinamese social andpolitical system is not as ethnic as it may have been in the past. The oldidea of apanjaht in terms of ethnic voting is explicitly called intoquestion when looking at how Doglas vote. Yet as the case studymaterial from the 2010 election results in Nickerie shows, it was notsimply Doglas who were challenging the apanjaht notion of ‘vote foryour own race’. Indeed, the fact that the NDP won twenty-three of thecountry’s fifty-one parliamentary seats indicates that in 2010 therewere an increasing number of citizens questioning Suriname’s ethnicconsociationalism.
Questioning Surinamese politics, questioning race
Were Suriname’s 2010 elections about ethnic consociationalism? Wereethnic categories meaningful? My data suggest that indeed, they were,but only to a certain extent. The long-held idea that in Surinamesesociety ethnicity dominates practically all spheres of social life holdstrue in the minds of many Surinamese, including Doglas. In 2010 therestill appeared to be a meta-ideology of ethnic essentialism that wasshared by most political party blocks and citizens alike. Yet this ideologywas challenged by Bouterse’s NDP and by Doglas, and also by peoplemore generally when considering how they decided on their vote.
Thus, my findings confirm Suriname’s consociationalism in thatmost political party leaders mapped themselves on certain segments ofsociety in an ethnically biased us-versus-them fashion. This behaviourof mobilizing the electorate seems to have created a social atmosphereof nepotism, or rather a nepotistically inspired pressure for people tovote ethnically, like a dominant family pressure on a somewhat largerscale. Despite the ethnic taboo in the mobilization of the electorate, thepersistent existence of the political slogan of ‘vote for people who looklike you’, and actions based on it, revealed the ease of someSurinamese to think in racial terms about themselves and others;they quite promptly presumed racial categories.
However, when we look at voting behaviour, in Nickerie at least, wesee that these elections were not all about apanjaht, not all aboutpeople ‘voting for their own race’. Instead many people werequestioning the relationship between themselves and the person they
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would ethnically be expected to vote for. This was possible because ofthe ethnic blurriness of the political system itself. It is not a simplechoice-less system in which one simply looks at the lists and ticks theethnic box or person who looks like them. There were twenty-oneparties listed in the run-up to these elections but Suriname’s electoratedid not consist of twenty-one ethnic groups. If this consociationalistsystem were truly organized along ethnic lines then � fictionallypostulated on the basis of the country’s four largest groups � why werethere not one Hindustani, one Creole, one Javanese, one Maroon, andperhaps one ‘Others’ party? Why were there not simply five main‘pillars’?
The multiplicity of Surinamese parties may partly be explained bythe political theory of ethnic outbidding. This theory starts from thepremise that the ethnic groups involved ‘are separately organized in allrespects’ and ‘all individuals within an ethnic group have identicalpreferences’ (Chandra 2005, pp. 236�7). New parties may stand upwhen disagreeing with the ‘ethnic mother party’ for working togetherwith parties of other ethnicities to get more votes. In the Surinamesecase various parties have historically splintered from the VHP, theNPS and the KTPI because they disagreed with the initial fraternizingcooperation between these parties.
This theory of ethnic outbidding invites party consociationalismrather than ethnic consociationalism. For the Surinamese case this waspointed out to me by several students I spoke to at Anton de KomUniversity in Paramaribo. They told me that when a Hindustanimember of the VHP, a Hindustani member of the Hindustani ‘splinter’party BVD and a Creole member of the NPS all applied for the samejob in a VHP-dominated ministry, the VHP would first prefer the VHPHindustani, but then, second, the NPS Creole rather than the BVDHindustani because they regarded the latter as a VHP ‘traitor’. Thissuggests that to some politicians a person’s party affiliation is moreimportant than their ethnic affiliation.
Furthermore, when considering the historical and programmaticinformation of all participating parties in Suriname’s 2010 elections,much of the consociationalist block forming can also be described interms of popular disagreements on levels such as rural versus urbanwelfare of citizens or unionist demands for better education and healthcare, or simply a general dissatisfaction with the political climate. Inother words, there is more to political identification in Suriname thanethnicity. A premise that ‘all individuals within an ethnic group haveidentical preferences’ is sociologically naive because it basicallypresumes citizens to be powerless followers of some predestined andlargely undefined ethnic behaviour rather than actors with aninteractive social life.
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Conclusion
I conclude then, that while we have been thinking about the nationalelections in Suriname as on a par with ethnic groupings, we can seethat these elections of 25 May 2010 were not simply about ethnicity.They were also about the youthful frustration with the status quo, thecharisma of certain personae and, perhaps most importantly, theideological battle that has been fought since the country’s indepen-dence between the ethnic VHP�NPS fraternity and Bouterse’snationalism. Thus, the common and somewhat abstract analyticalidea of Surinamese ethnic politics obscures a reality that is morecomplex than one dealing with ethnic issues alone. Of course, onecannot deny the importance of ethnic categorizations in Suriname andparticularly in the political sphere, but what I submit is that at thesame time there have been various counter-currents at work becausepeople are too complex to be captured in an exclusively ethniccategory, and because the Surinamese political system is too complexto maintain clear ethnic categories.
Notes
1. An earlier version of this paper was presented during the 35th Annual Conference of
the Society for Caribbean Studies held in Liverpool, 29 June � 1 July 2011.
2. In 1973 this was renamed Vooruitstrevende Hervormingspartij (Progressive Reform
Party, VHP).
3. Jagernath Lachmon died on 18 October 2001 and was succeeded by Ram Sardjoe
(also VHP).
4. In 2005 three Maroon parties, including former guerrilla leader Brunswijk’s Algemene
Bevrijdings- en Ontwikkelings Partij (General Liberation and Development Party, ABOP),
united in the A-Combinatie (A-Combination).
5. According to the Surinamese Bureau of Statistics (ABS 2005), 60 per cent of Nickerie’s
population self-identified as Hindustani, in comparison to 27 per cent in Suriname as a
whole.
6. To avoid potential confusions because of similarities in name, Premdew Lachman,
member of the party NS and listed for the Mega Combination in Nickerie in 2010, is not
Jagernath Lachmon, founder of the VHP and influential proponent of the New Front’s
fraternization politics (see historical overview).
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IRIS MARCHAND is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at theUniversity of Edinburgh.ADDRESS: Department of Social Anthropology, School of Socialand Political Studies, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal MacmillanBuilding, 15A George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD, UK.Email: [email protected]
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