A high-stakes political reshuffle is unfolding in Suriname, where the Ministry of Justice and Security has ordered police officers assigned to Transport, Communication and Tourism (TCT) Minister Raymond Landveld to report back to their commanding officers by Wednesday morning. Justice and Security Minister Harish Monorath has publicly denied any connection between this security personnel recall and the escalating ongoing conflict at the Telecommunicatie Autoriteit Suriname (TAS), framing the move as part of a long-planned, large-scale personnel reassignment policy that has been in progress for weeks.
The timing of the recall, however, has drawn close public scrutiny, coming immediately after Landveld sent a controversial letter this week that triggered the current TAS crisis. In the correspondence dated Tuesday, Landveld notified TAS Director Wendy Jap-A-Joe that her five-year term in office expired on October 19, ordering her to hand over all administrative responsibilities to the TAS Board of Commissioners (RvC).
Jap-A-Joe has outright rejected Landveld’s directive, grounding her pushback in the terms of her employment contract. She argues that her departure does not meet the legal definition of a director vacancy as outlined in Article 4, Paragraph 2 of Suriname’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Act. The dispute has already spilled over into Suriname’s national legislature, the De Nationale Assemblee, where it sparked a heated confrontation between ABOP party representative Stanley Betterson and National Democratic Party (NDP) faction leader Rabin Parmessar. In protest of the handling of the issue, the entire ABOP faction walked out of the parliamentary session. The conflict then moved to the TAS headquarters on Tuesday, where the RvC’s attempt to force a handover ended in failure.
Monorath has repeatedly pushed back against speculation that the recall of Landveld’s security detail is tied to the TAS dispute. In an interview with local outlet Starnieuws, he explained that the broader reassignment policy targets police officers who have served in the same post for more than two years, requiring them to be replaced or reassigned to new roles. He noted that the policy has already been in motion for weeks, with dozens of security officers already reassigned across multiple government posts, and Landveld’s detail is just the latest group affected.
The justice minister added that long tenures in fixed security posts created unnecessary risks, pointing out that some officers had remained assigned to the same official or position for as long as 16 years. He also highlighted that unregulated transfers of security personnel between high-level officials, carried out without required approval from competent authorities, had become a persistent problem that the policy aims to correct.
Monorath emphasized that the reassignment drive is not targeted exclusively at Landveld. For years, public and parliamentary critics have questioned the large-scale deployment of active police officers for personal security detail for government officials, arguing it stretches thin regular police resources. According to Monorath, President Jennifer Simons has explicitly ordered that all police officers assigned to non-regular security detail roles return to standard policing duties. Multiple members of the De Nationale Assemblee have also repeatedly raised criticism over the overuse of police personnel for private security work.
Beyond operational concerns, Monorath pointed to the significant fiscal burden the practice places on the Surinamese state. He calculated that a 13-officer security detail for a single high-level official costs the state roughly 500,000 Surinamese dollars per month. The minister added that affected officials were previously given the opportunity to voluntarily reduce the size of their security details, and the ministry is only stepping in to enforce cuts where officials have failed to comply with the policy. He confirmed that security personnel will continue to be recalled from other senior officials in the coming weeks as the policy rolls out.