No surprise when De Klerk defends the indefensible

IN A television interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN this month, apartheid’s last president, FW de Klerk, caused outrage when he appeared to defend the apartheid system that legalised racism in SA between 1948 and 1990 and which was condemned by the United Nations (UN) as a “crime against humanity”. Cartoonists lampooned De Klerk as a political dinosaur, while other critics called on him to return the Nobel Peace Prize he won with Nelson Mandela in 1993.

On closer inspection, the greater outrage may actually be that so many people were so surprised by De Klerk’s comments, much of which he had consistently put on the public record for decades. A close reading of this history shows repudiating apartheid would have represented an act of political parricide for De Klerk, as his entire family history was based on the implementation of this ideology. De Klerk did not help end apartheid because it was morally repugnant, but because, in his own words, “it failed” as a system of political control and socioeconomic engineering. One of the most famous conversions since St Paul tumbled off his horse on the road to Damascus was undertaken more out of political pragmatism than moral conviction.

During the CNN interview, De Klerk acknowledged that the fact that apartheid trampled human rights “was and remains morally indefensible”, but then noted that he could only say in “a qualified way” that apartheid had been morally wrong. He argued that the idea of the black majority being herded into Bantustans was “not repugnant” and was historically inaccurate since, in his view, the homelands had always been there.

He then fatuously compared the Bantustans favourably with the democratic “velvet divorce” of Czechoslovakia in 1993, and further noted that blacks “were not disenfranchised, they voted”. By this jaundiced view of history, a system that had reserved less than 15% of land for 80% of South Africans, restricted their freedom of movement, and stripped them of their human dignity, was somehow defensible. The black majority must also have been electing racist rulers to oppress them.

Sensing the outrage caused by his comments and the immense damage done to his reputation, De Klerk sought to backtrack, claiming his statements had been “misinterpreted”. His record suggests otherwise.

De Klerk was the scion of a conservative Afrikaner family and a dyed-in-the-wool apartheid-supporting National Party (NP) member. Both his father and grandfather were senators for the party of apartheid, and his father served in the government of apartheid’s architect, Hendrik Verwoerd. De Klerk held seven ministerial posts before becoming president in 1989, but had never shown any signs of a commitment to reforming the evils of the apartheid system. He was a staunch defender of white privilege who, as education minister in the 1980s, pushed to introduce a quota system to limit the number of black students in universities. Even as late as November 1989, De Klerk opposed common political institutions for all South Africans. He embarked on a remarkable political reversal three months later — releasing Mandela from 27 years of incarceration — under the pressure of continuing black protests and a plummeting economy wracked by increasingly devastating economic sanctions.

De Klerk, however, deserves some credit for his role in SA’S democratic transition.

A pragmatic peacemaker, De Klerk partnered with Mandela to negotiate a remarkable and innovative power-sharing accord that brought majority rule to SA in 1994. But he never really seemed to recognise the evils of apartheid and to condemn it unequivocally. De Klerk was often defensive about criticisms of apartheid’s leaders, talking about “mutual forgiveness” as if one side had not been disproportionately the perpetrators and the other the victims. Much to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s annoyance, De Klerk refused during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process between 1995 and 1998 to take proper responsibility for the crimes of apartheid governments in which he served. In his shockingly self-justifying 1999 memoir, The Last Trek: A New Beginning, he sought to portray the TRC as a witch-hunt against Afrikaners, and to dismiss apartheid’s crimes as having been committed by a small group of securocrats without the knowledge of most NP politicians.

De Klerk bluntly noted: “I rejected the contention that one side had been morally superior to the other during the conflict.”

He described the African National Congress’s (ANC’S) armed struggle as “unnecessary and counterproductive,” claiming only a “relatively small portion” of the 22 000 people who died in political violence were killed by the security forces. He thus appeared effectively to blame most of the killings on the black majority and the “revolutionary movements”.

De Klerk quoted the hard-line PW Botha’s call for security forces to “wipe out terrorists”, but then incredibly noted that this “could not … in any way be interpreted as authorising the security forces to assassinate or murder its opponents”.

Apartheid’s last leader sought to portray his party as reformers spurned by the ANC, claiming disingenuously that the NP had accepted the vision of a united SA by the time the ANC accelerated its armed struggle.

Criticisms of the “terrorists” and “revolutionaries” of the liberation struggle litter the book. De Klerk noted that the apartheid justice minister had taken care to ensure the state of emergency of 1985-86 “should be taken in strict compliance with the law”: a statement that seemed to imply Draconian laws passed by an illegitimate regime could somehow be considered to be legal.

Noting that 20 000 people were detained and demonstrations prohibited, De Klerk argued that “I believed that all these steps were necessary”, insisting the policy had succeeded in reducing social unrest. Though conceding that these measures also “created circumstances … in which serious breaches of human rights could, and did, occur”, he described them euphemistically as “unconventional methods to combat the revolutionary threat.”

In a clear abdication of responsibility, De Klerk’s 1999 memoirs were a stout defence of the very apartheid system that he has never unambiguously repudiated. He talked of the “undeniable progress” many blacks made under apartheid and praised the “sincere efforts” apartheid governments made to “improve their circumstances”: all this, despite the denial of proper education, health and social services, as well as the most basic political and legal rights, to blacks.

De Klerk described the mandate and composition of the TRC as “flawed,” expressing surprise it applied a harsher standard in judging the crimes of apartheid securocrats than ANC abuses. Incredibly, he noted an “overwhelming majority” of NP members had been shocked by the human rights abuses committed by “some elements” of the security forces. De Klerk seemed to suggest even the leaders of the country did not know what was being done in their name.

In light of this often staunch defence of apartheid, De Klerk’s recent comments should really not come as a surprise. One wonders in retrospect whether Mandela should perhaps not have rejected the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 rather than accepting a moral equivalence between a pragmatic politician of apartheid and the political prophet who assured its destruction.

Dr Adebajo is executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution, Cape Town, and author of UN Peacekeeping in Africa.