De Klerk’s Comments

Late last week, former South African president F.W. de Klerk created quite a bit of controversy around the world with comments he made about his views regarding apartheid.  De Klerk, the last president of apartheid-era South Africa, is himself a very controversial figure historically.  He was a career politician who never floundered in his belief in apartheid.  When he took over as president in 1989, he inherited a country that was in chaos.  South Africa was in a deep financial crisis due to international sanctions, boycotts, and divestment, they were internationally isolated and roundly condemned as the world’s pariah, and there was a consistent and powerful mass action of anti-apartheid resistance that had refused to back down in the face of incessant State of Emergencies. It was in this context that within a year of taking office, that de Klerk took the drastic steps of unbanning the ANC, PAC, and other political parties, as well as releasing numerous imprisoned political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela. De Klerk was arguably in a position where reform was needed and needed urgently for the sake of the entire country, not just for the sake of the Afrikaners or the white South Africans.  This is where a major part of the controversy originates from.  Does this about-face after decades of white-only Afrikaner apartheid mean that de Klerk was the hero of South Africa or just a pragmatist? Did de Klerk really want to end apartheid?  Did he really see it as a crime against humanity, which the United Nations had labeled it in 1966? These questions are important for the stance he took during the negotiations from 1990-1994.

Around the world, and amongst much of South Africa, de Klerk was praised for abandoning militantly conservative Afrikaner Nationalism and agreeing to negotiate with organizations and individuals that he and his government considered terrorists for decades.  But amongst some ultraconservative Afrikaners, de Klerk was viewed as weak, someone who had stabbed Afrikanerdom in the back and sold out his people.  He was seen as a traitor by this group.  He was jointly awarded the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize along with Nelson Mandela for negotiating a peaceful end to apartheid, but there are those who view de Klerk’s part of the prize with skepticism due to his background and beliefs.  It was during this negotiating period when tens of thousands of South Africans were killed in brutal conflicts that raged in townships around the country.  Although it was portrayed by the government as “black-on-black” violence and “ethnic fighting” between the Zulus and the Xhosa, much of it was being furthered by the de Klerk government and their security forces.  This “third force,” as Mandela referred to it, was instigating and perpetuating much of this brutal violence to try and discredit and weaken the ANC and to derail the negotiating process.  This was later revealed in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the late 1990s.

In the 1994 elections, de Klerk was named Deputy President alongside Thabo Mbeki and under President Nelson Mandela, but he retired from politics in 1997.

But since then, de Klerk has made several pubic comments throughout the years that have shown who is really is and exposed his true commitment of reconciliation.  He has disparaged Mandela by saying that he is not the saint-like figure that the world made him out to be.  His recent comments, coming from the U.S., brought such condemnation that some are calling for his Nobel Peace Prize to be rescinded as a result.

De Klerk did say in a speech and follow-up interview that apartheid was “morally indefensible,” but then he went on to defend the concept of “separate but equal” nation states, such as the apartheid government put into effect through their Homelands policy.  De Klerk said, “the concept of giving, as the Czechs have it now, and the Slovaks have it, of saying that ethnic unity with one culture with one language [everyone] can be happy and can fulfill their democratic aspirations in an own state, that is not repugnant.”

He also denied that black Africans in the Homelands were disenfranchised. “They were not disenfranchised, they voted. They were not put in homelands, the homelands were historically there. If only the developed world would put so much money into Africa, which is struggling with poverty, as we poured into those homelands. How many universities were built? How many schools?” he asked.

His foundation, The FW de Klerk Foundation, then issued a statement backing up what the former president meant about the “separate but equal” nation states. “This, after all, is what has happened in such societies all over the world — in the territorial divisions of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and more recently in Sudan. It is the solution that has long been advocated for Israel/Palestine,” the foundation said.

The fact that de Klerk is trying to justify the Homeland system, a policy that was nothing more than a form of ethnic cleansing by the forced removal of millions of people to 10 different homogeneous lands (one for the Xhosa, one for the Zulu, one for the Venda, etc.) in which these were to become independent nations separate from South Africa, is outrageous.

The National Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu) was so appalled by his comments that they demanded that de Klerk’s Nobel Peace Prize be retracted over the comments. “De Klerk exposed himself to be an unapologetic proponent of a racist, fascist system that oppressed the majority,” Nehawu spokesperson Sizwe Pamla said in a statement.

First of all, in South Africa’s situation, you did not have Xhosas, Zulus, Sothos, and others actually wanting to be part of a new independent country based on their ethnicity like you had in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Sudan.  These examples simply do not work historically.  Secondly, to argue that the apartheid government invested greatly into the Homelands with schools makes it seem like the Homelands were glorious places to live.  The Homelands were the most unproductive land in the country, the schools were funded at a pitiful percentage of what white schools were, their universities were racially segregated, and people did not have a choice whether they lived here or not as the government forced them to become citizens of these new “nations.”  Thirdly, to even try to claim that Africans in the Homelands had any sort of legitimate say in the electoral process is a joke.  However you look at it, these were South Africans who could not vote and therefore had no serious representation in their country.  What de Klerk is doing is merely trying to re-write history just like the South African media did during the dark days of apartheid.

But as abhorrent as de Klerk’s comments are, they also shed light onto the state of South Africa 18 years after apartheid.  It helps show that there are still many who try to justify apartheid policies.  It helps remind us that just because apartheid is out of the law books that its ideas are not out of people’s heads.

A Zapiro cartoon portraying de Klerk’s comments that appeared in the Mail and Guardian‘s Sunday Times in South Africa on May 13, 2012.