De Klerk, the man who ended apartheid

It was not easy to be Frederik Willem De Klerk. A strong believer in apartheid, which he described in euphemistic terms as “separate development”, during much of his political career, declared the end of apartheid in February 1990 a few months after he became president, freed Nelson Mandela after 27 years of imprisonment, and lifted the ban on African National Congress (ANC) and other political organisations.

Though his momentous decision appeared to be that of a man who had a change of heart, he did not let go the reins of power easily.

He was seen as a tough and a wily bargainer, who is believed to have egged on the Inkatha Freedom Party of Zulus to unleash violence on the blacks which took the country to the brink of a civil war.

The debate is still on as to why De Klerk put up the white flag and surrendered. It has been said that he did so because after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc regimes, he knew that international pressure would grow on South Africa.

The implication is that the racist regime was allowed to function in South Africa because it was seen as a bulwark against international communism. The argument is plausible because the United States supported dictatorial regimes in Iran and in the Philippines during the 1960s, 1970s and mid-1980s. But it does not hold good because the international sanctions which were crippling South African economy were already in place.

It seems that the fall of communism left apartheid in South Africa more brittle than ever. But De Klerk had made it appear that he was dismantling apartheid because it was morally unjustified.

He did share the 1993 Nobel Prize for Peace with Nelson Mandela, but the motives for his decision to end apartheid appeared to be opportunistic to many black leaders, including Mandela. But Mandela acknowledged that De Klerk was a man of integrity.

It is tempting to compare De Klerk to Mikhail Gorbachev who helped bring down the communist regime in Russia.

It is possible that Gorbachev too did what he did because communism in Russia was at the end of its tether in the latter half of the 1980s. But Gorbachev did not face the acute dilemma that De Klerk faced in a racially segmented South Africa.

Most Russians were fed up with communism as economic hardship began to hit them hard.

De Klerk tried to play divisive politics even after he announced the end of apartheid and destroyed evidence of the cruelties of the apartheid regime.

In the televised message before his death, De Klerk said that he believed that apartheid was wrong and he had a change of heart and moral conversion.

But a few years after he left office in 1997, he persisted in defending apartheid as “separate development”. But he left no ambiguity in his last public utterance: “I, without qualification, apologise for the pain, hurt, indignity and the damage that apartheid has done to Black, Brown and Indians in South Africa.”

As the testimony of a man on his death-bed, we have to take his words at face value. But those words are that of a complex man. A South African journalist, Redi Thlabi, writing De Klerk’s obituary in The Washington Post has described him as “a true son and later elder of right-wing Afrikaans Calvinism”.

Those last words were the confession and apology of a tough man with religious pangs, a man who must have pondered over the pros and cons of good and evil.