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SURINAM: SLOW BOAT TO A SLOW WAR

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I was in the steamy hellhole of Surinam, the land that God did not forget, only because he was fortunate enough never to have been there in the first place.

BOOM! I opened one eye from my siesta and groggily speculated on what foolishness the guerrillas were up to. Another boom, and a third. No commie aircraft overhead, so it had to be the guerrillas. The hell with it, back to sleep.

“The booms you heard were when the guerrillas’ leader, Ronny Brunswijk, was detonating homemade rockets we made for him to impress his followers,” the British mercs in country told us when we asked what the hell was going on.

The “booming” was another example of the foolishness, fantasy and frustration we’d been threading our way through ever since we left SOF headquarters in Boulder the previous week to visit, write about and, if we were lucky, assist in an obscure, primitive anti-communist insurgency deep in the jungles of South America.

What started out as a straightforward reporting project slowly turned into an attempt to overthrow a corrupt president. I kick myself for not keeping a diary during all those years of running around the world. This was one of the rare times that I had enough self-discipline to keep one but only because I had to for the assignment.

This latest SOF adventure had started innocently enough. SOF’s G.B. Crouse, a former Marine, had contacted the Sygma Photo Agency seeking photos to supplement a number of articles we had in inventory.

“Interested in a story on the war in Surinam?” the Sygma editor queried Crouse during the course of the conversation.

“‘I’d like to look at it,” replied Crouse.

“I’ll send it out for your amusement,” shot back the Sygma rep. A few days later we had a piece on a handful of Brit mercs and ill-equipped but intrepid anti-communist bush commandos, by the daredevil French military photojournalist Patrick Chauvel. Short, always wired, thin and totally fearless, Chauvel tore through the streets of Paris his motorcycle as if every destination was about to burst into war any second. Not as if just riding through Paris wasn’t as dangerous as any battleground. The fact that he loved his booze no doubt enhanced his confidence.

We called Chauvel: “Can you get us in?”

“A piece of cake,” Chauvel replied. Chauvel jetted into Boulder, where we debriefed him, and then phoned the leader of the Brit mercs, Karl Penta, who got our adrenaline pumping.

“If you get down here in the next three days, you can get in on something big,” Karl hurriedly explained. We were on. How could we miss an anti-communist coup de main? We made calls to various manufacturers to round up miscellaneous equipment. Chauvel assured us that his connections could get us through French Customs in French Guiana. We had to infiltrate into Surinam from the neighboring French colony. with anything except guns and ammo. We were leaving in 48 hours. In a whirlwind two days, we Federal Expressed gear to Miami, and hastily got malaria pills, plane tickets and visas.

I took Derry Gallagher and Bob MacKenzie with me. Gallagher was a slim, blue-eyed blonde who was wound tighter than a watch spring. He was a Vietnam vet who was my SOF Assistant Director of Special Operations. MacKenzie, a Vietnam combat vet with many years in the Rhodesian SAS during their Bush War was a great one to watch your back and take out anyone trying to stick a knife in it. We headed to Cayenne, French Guiana, by way of Miami and Puerto Rico, or so I thought. We busted our ass and the bank when I decided to get a haircut. Rush was the name of the game. However, in Puerto Rico, we had sufficient lag-over time to get my not so golden locks, what was left of them, trimmed. As I relaxed in the barber chair, Gallagher stomped into the barbershop.

“Brown, you missed the flight,” he grumped. I had failed to take into account the change in time zones from Miami. Panic time. I would miss the action. MacKenzie and Chauvel caught the flight to French Guiana while leaving Gallagher behind to round up my sorry ass. There were no more direct flights to Cayenne until the following week. What to do? Catch a flight to Caracas and overnight, a flight to Rio and overnight the next day, a flight to Belem, Brazil with a connecting flight to Cayenne. Right? Wrong. In Rio, pompous immigration officials said. “No. No. No. Have to leave the country tomorrow.”

“But we just want to go to Belem and catch a connecting flight,” we argued to no avail.

Gallagher and I got to watch the Rio Carnival on TV from the inside of the immigration office. The next day we flew to Lima, then to Bolivia, then to Cayenne. The coup would not wait! Or so I thought.

Cayenne, administrative capital of French Guiana, was a slow-paced tropical town, hot and humid, with the required amount of sea and sun. The only eyebrow raisers for the jaded SOFers, until our guides finally showed up, were the bare-breasted French beauties lounging around the hotel pool. We had a week of impatient waiting before we were finally off to St. Laurent, at the head of the Maroni River across from Surinam, to link up with our guides to the guerrillas and the mercs. As mentioned, I kept a diary during our “sojourn”:

4 MARCH 1987

After a sleepless night in a roach-filled $6.00 room located over the town’s disco, which boasted a three-piece band and one chubby hooker with bad teeth, we overloaded our gear on a leaky pirogue and shoved off for guerrilla HQ.

“Government gunboat on the starboard,” Chauvel muttered.

Our adrenaline levels rose slightly as the gunboat moved out into mid-channel. However, we lost her in a maze of jungle river channels in a few klicks. I took to thinking about what our course of action should be if we were ambushed at a narrow portion of the river. Over the side? Not to worry, we were assured. Piranhas don’t attack unless there’s blood in the water. Perhaps we should just point our cameras toward the ambush and hope the bad guys realize we’re journalists?

16 MARCH 1987

I had a one-and-a-half-hour interview with Michel Van Rey, Ronny Bruns-wijk’s military adviser, graduate sociologist and former Surinamese Army lieutenant. The mercs considered him a “snake” whom Karl had threatened to kill, apparently because Van Rey wanted to get rid of the mercs. Van Rey stated that the guerrilla headquarters had radio contact with five of II guerrilla commandos scattered throughout the northeast of Surinam. He also provided an estimate of the situation, which boiled down to the guerrillas having insufficient arms to overthrow the Marxist regime headed by Desi Bouterse, which had been in power since 1980.

Lunch consisted of a few cans of whatever got thrown in the pot— beans, carrots, peas, sausages. A young guerrilla in a red beret, with whom I traded badges, was making a voodoo charm out of metal cable. The kid said the charm would have more power if it was made in the presence of a white man.

Earlier in the day, the French pilot contracted to fly a captured Cessna 204 flew a practice-bombing run with homemade rockets. They did not explode, as they did not land on the detonator due to the crude firing pins and the lack of fin stabilization. A ground party could not find all of those rockets and apparently they are still there, armed.

Karl was disillusioned with Brunswijk’s lack of aggression. He planned to move with 20 Hindus to the west, carry out an ambush and blow up a POL (petrol, oil, lubricants) facility. Karl said the Hindus spoke English and had a higher level of education. He envisioned organizing this group into a 200-man nucleus and seizing the predominantly Hindu western part of the country. The idea was to further shut the economy down. Karl planned to leave half the weapons captured in the ambush in a cache in the jungle; he would send two of Ronny’s men back to the cache, and the rest of the captured weapons would go with Karl and his Hindu cadre to the west. The plan sounded interesting, as Ronny was inactive.

The Mercs sincerely appreciated the web gear and equipment we had brought as they had none and desperately needed that equipment in order to facilitate their move to the west. Good rapport was established since arrival. Charlie Mosley, a three-tour veteran of the U.K.’s Coldstream Guards and who served with the Grey’s Scouts in Rhodesia, said Ronny had a “movie star” mentality. There were a number of reasons for him thinking this:

  1. Ronny would replace the pilot of his plane and would taxi it down the tarmac after landing so his men would think he flew it.
  2. His voodoo doctor, a Hindu, went into a trance and then said that Ronny should not go into battle.
  3. A merc said Ronny fired bullets into a shirt, then had a man put it on to demonstrate that he is impervious to bullets and, therefore, Ronny had powerful voodoo.
  4. Bush commandos believed that if they stood on one leg and put a leaf in their mouths they would be invisible to their enemies. Charlie told of four of them caught in the middle of the road by a government-armored vehicle. They utilized this technique and were all blown away. Perhaps they had the wrong type of leaf!
  5. Ronny had blown up most of the rockets and bombs because he liked to make loud noises to impress his followers.
  6. Karl captured a spy in St. Laurent and got him to confess to throwing grenades in Cayenne, which resulted in his control, the Surinamese consulate in Cayenne, being expelled. Ronny made the spy the jailer and storekeeper in his guerrilla headquarters.

The mercs were planning a homemade napalm air attack for Albina, located in Surinam, across the Marone river from St. Laurent, on Wednesday night. They planned on using an LPG canister with field-expedient drogue chute to stabilize the bomb into a nose-down attitude. They were to drop it on Albina, then they would strafe the Surinamese gunboat with the single guerrilla MAG out the door of the plane. The pilot didn’t know about this phase of the mission and we weren’t told how they were going to convince him to fly it. Perhaps with a pistol to the head?

The “plan” called for us to leave for St. Laurent by pirogue the day of the napalm attack so we could photograph the attack from across the river. We were then to link up with MacKenzie, who was going to be the gunner on the plane, after it landed at a small strip outside of St. Laurent. We were then to leave the shit hole and proceed to Cayenne. We needed to figure out commo with Karl so when we got back to Surinam at a later date, we could link up.

17 MARCH 1987

Guerrilla headquarters on the island was in a former Dutch administrative center for this isolated area. Admin HQ had a small dirt strip that would take a single-engine Cessna, a hospital, guest houses where the mercs were billeted, and a radio station.

A Cessna 204, taken by the guerrillas, operated on the small airfield at guerrilla headquarters. Sergeant Major Henk Van Rendwick, who was the OIC of Echo Battalion, Bouterse’s version of Special Forces, had captured it. Van Rendwick had been captured during a guerrilla ambush in which three government troops were killed and had agreed to join the guerrillas. After three months, according to Charlie, Brunswijk gave him 300,000 guilders to buy weapons in Brazil. Instead, he split for the fleshpots of Holland.

“Brunswijk figured Van Rendwick had ‘turned around,’“ Charlie noted sarcastically. “He went the wrong way and became a crook.”

At 1400 hours, we were at the airplane on the strip, photographing the mercs rigging the drogue chute with the homemade bomb. The chute was cobbled together from a shower curtain and shroud lines were made from heavy monofilament fishing line. The mercs were to kick the “bomb” out of the plane’s door which would deploy the drogue chute and stabilize the bomb in a nose-down position which, with luck, would ensure that the firing device would hit the ground.

For the practice run, they filled the LPG cylinder with water to approximate the weight of the bomb when filled with napalm. The “plan” was to make an approach between 500 and 600 feet and kick the bomb out so we could observe chute deployment and confirm the nose-down position of the bomb upon impact.

The bomb was loaded, the chute rigged, the kicker boarded and the pilot took off. As the plane approached off course, the bomb was kicked out. The chute tore away and the bomb tumbled into the jungle, lost until searchers dug it up. Fortunately, the mercs were more adept at blowing up bridges than conducting air ops.

18 MARCH 1987

The previous night Karl said, “A guerrilla-initiated action killed 16 of Bouterse’s men. Bouterse’s man was burnt alive and the others were shot. No further details.”

An anti-Bouterse Hindu businessman was very frustrated with Ronny as he had been asking for arms and uniforms for two months. The Hindu allegedly had 200 men but no weapons, near Nickerie, west of the capital of Paramaribo. This was a prosperous agricultural area where the majority of Surinam’s farming was conducted. Karl was to use explosives that had been cached at jungle camps to attack the oil refinery.

“I don’t know what happened to Ronny. He has lost all interest in the war. He is waiting for something, and we don’t know what it is,” Karl said.

About 1130 hours, we caught a canoe to a French outpost on Maroni River and spent the afternoon with the French commander talking mechanics and the finances of buying and selling gold nuggets/dust dredged from rivers. No boat to St. Laurent that day, “maybe” the next day.

20 MARCH 1987

After a 10-hour ride down the Maroni River, made interesting by our jovial boat crew, who were snorting and sniffing something, smoking pot and boozing it up the entire trip until we finally arrived in civilization. I’d take a Huey any day.

21 MARCH 1987

In St. Laurent, I interviewed Dr. Eddie Josefzoon, a political adviser, and Michel Van Rey:

Doctor Josefzoon was formerly an adviser to the Minister of Education. He was a representative of the Bush Negro groups: the largest group were the Creoles, second largest the Hindus, and third largest were the Javanese.

“Thirty-five percent of the population of Surinam was in the Netherlands, the majority of whom left in 1975 because of the uncertainty about their future once Surinam became independent,” he said. There were about 180,000 exiles in the Netherlands from Surinam. The conflict was a “civil war” rather than a revolution to overthrow the government.

“When the war started the thought was it would take two to six months. We were too optimistic,” Josefzoon stated. When it started the guerrillas were short of money and weapons, but we were convinced we were fighting for a good cause: democracy. We thought we could get help from France, the U.S., Brazil, Venezuela or Holland; Western democracies. We were obviously overly optimistic. All these countries opposed Bouterse. The Dutch government compared Bouterse with an animal. You hear that kind of statement and then you tend to believe you’ll get help from these countries,” he said.

“The Dutch say they are sympathetic and understand what is going on. They agree that we want to bring back democracy but they can’t give anything more than moral support,” he continued. After this disappointment, Van Rey said, “We decided to do things ourselves, to buy weapons; solve our own logistics problems.”

“Ronny started with 40 men in July 1986, and at this moment he needed to have 1,500 men. Lack of weapons and ammunition is the main problem, and the problem is not being solved. In the last few months the guerrillas lost between one and two million guilders that had been ripped off by unscrupulous arms dealers or people alleging to be arms dealers,” Van Rey said.

“I believe that additional pressures applied to Bouterse will cause the people to rise up against him, like in the Philippine situation where Aquino was successful. I believe they can be successful if they obtain $500,000. The government had 2,000 men but morale was bad; the troops were poorly trained. One U.S. pilot, a 63-year-old Vietnam veteran [name unknown], was flying one of their choppers. Bouterse had four other pilots, all foreigners,” Van Rey said.

“There was no conflict between Ronny and the other guerrilla commanders,” Josefzoon said. This contradicted the information that Patrick Chauvel received in a letter from an acquaintance. It stated that four bush commanders had told Ronny that they were no longer going to follow his orders unless he came to the front and showed up with weapons.

“10 well-trained officers were waiting to come from the Netherlands and a lot more were standing by,” Van Rey said. “The above-mentioned individuals are not interested in fighting this type of war, whatever that meant. We apparently had a Catch-22 situation. The people in the Netherlands who were going to come had stated that they ‘must have well trained soldiers and then we will help.’“

“Bouterse is more incompetent than Ronny. Josefzoon feels that military pressure was being kept on Bouterse and that Ronny commanded the loyalty of the men. He was not in favor of using mercs but needed personnel to conduct training,” Van Rey continued.

“Foreign countries want us to get rid of the mercs but they do not provide any assistance,” Josefzoon said. “There are 60 Libyan mercs and 14 blacks from Angola working for the Bouterse government. These were mercs but nobody said anything about them,” he complained.

“One of the conditions for help from Western democracies would be unification of the various exile groups, but no similar provision or requirement is made of the Afghan rebels. It’s unfair.”

ESTIMATE OF THE SITUATION

Even though the ragtag rebels were outnumbered, poorly trained, ill-equipped and led by a charismatic but mercurial leader (one merc described Brunswijk as a 25-year-old with the brain of a nine-year-old), they still managed to force Bouterse’s Marxist government into a military stalemate. Bouterse’s 2,000-man army was also poorly trained, and had neither the stomach nor the strength to conduct effective counter-guerrilla operations in Surinam’s dense jungle terrain. Government forces ceded control of the entire northeastern section of Surinam to the guerrillas, maintaining a single isolated outpost in Albina, located on the mouth of the Maroni River which borders French Guiana.

Guerrilla operations, haphazard and amateurish as they were, nonetheless almost brought the economy to a standstill. The guerrillas had forced closure of Alcoa’s bauxite mine, which provided some 80 percent of the country’s foreign exchange; cut power lines to the capital and rendered all but one of the major roads impassable. Raids on palm oil plantations, lumber operations and the aluminum industry cost Bouterse’s regime at least $150 million. However, guerrilla forces were too unsophisticated to capitalize on the growing discontent in Paramaribo, which was been fueled by political oppression and import shortages.

Brunswijk’s “Surinam Liberation Army” was aligned with an exile group in Holland led by Henk Chin-a-sen, who served as president under Bouterse. He met with U.S. State Department officials seeking support, but as one might expect, received no promises of assistance.

The wild card in this conflict was France, whose interests in Surinam were obvious. The French space station was located at Kourou, French Guiana, and the Libyan troublemakers who were tied into supporting an embryonic independence movement in French Guiana prompted the French to allow the Surinamese guerrillas freedom of movement in and out of St. Laurent for purposes of re-supply. Highly placed French sources suggested that if the Libyans were killed or captured in combat, the French might be willing to do more.

The tragedy of this obscure little war was that a primitive people who simply wished to return to democracy could not elicit $500,000-worth of arms and supplies from weak-willed Western democracies. Some years later, we found out from a former U.S. Army Delta Force officer that the U.S. had a contingency plan to invade Surinam after our invasion of Grenada. “Bouterse,” he said, “however was smart enough to see the writing on the wall and kicked out all his Cuban military advisors. Therefore, the invasion plan was scrapped.”

Gallagher, MacKenzie and I reviewed the Surinam situation when we returned to Boulder. We agreed that there was potential to overthrow a thuggish, pro-communist regime that was up to its ears in the dope business and counterfeiting U.S. dollars. I had MacKenzie recruit three of his buddies who were fellow veterans of the Rhodesian SAS to go back to Surinam and the bush guerrillas to determine if it was feasible to overthrow Bouterse.

Their report was positive. In short, a couple dozen mercs, all of whom would be ex-Rhodesian SAS personnel, and $500,000 for guns would get the job done. I sent Gallagher to Amsterdam to liaise with Suranamese exiles who were supporting the guerrillas. They were basically incompetent; full of promises but had squandered the funds they had raised. He returned to Boulder out of sorts and disgusted. I was in contact with one source who was seriously interested in the operation but he up and died on me.

For the want of half a million, a revolution was lost.