South African president helped end apartheid
F.W. de Klerk, who as South Africa’s last white president opened the door to Black majority rule by releasing Nelson Mandela from prison, died Thursday at his home in Cape Town. He was 85.
A son of a politically prominent family within South Africa’s white Afrikaner minority, de Klerk saw himself as a moderate reformer who hoped to preserve the old white-dominated political order even while loosening the reins of repression.
de Klerk was South Africa’s last president under the apartheid system of racial segregation. He we replaced in the ofiice by Mandela.
Like Mikhail Gorbachev in his attempts to reform the Soviet Union, de Klerk unleashed a process of rapid transformation he could not control that led to the toppling of the old regime. Still, under de Klerk’s stewardship, the changes came without large-scale bloodshed, which many observers hailed as near miraculous.
Although he and Mandela shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, the two men became bitter antagonists during the grueling negotiations over the shape of South Africa’s future government. At the peace prize ceremony in Oslo, though, Mandela graciously praised his fellow Nobel winner.
“He had the courage to admit that a terrible wrong had been done to our country and people,” said Mandela, and “the foresight to understand and accept that all the people of South Africa must, through negotiations and as equal participants, together determine what they want to make of their future.”
Born in Johannesburg on March 18, 1936, Frederik Willem de Klerk was the youngest chief executive in South African history when he took power in 1989.
As president, de Klerk moved slowly but decisively. In a historic televised address in 1990 he announced he planned to free Mandela and end the ban on the African National Congress, which was the main organization seeking to overthrow apartheid.
He and his party were defeated by Mandela and the ANC in South Africa’s first multiracial election in April 1994.
For years de Klerk insisted apartheid was in its origins “an honorable vision of justice” that over time had proved unworkable and unjust. He characterized the system as a mere mistake rather than a machine of brutal repression that had denied the vast majority of South Africans the most basic human rights. But in August 1996, he apologized to the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the “pain and suffering” the regime caused.