TEN years to the day after he announced Nelson Mandela would be freed from prison and the African National Congress and other organisations opposing apartheid would be unbanned, F W de Klerk is a happy man. “I look back and I say: ‘No regrets,'” he said on Wednesday in an interview with Cape Talk radio station. “I am very happy. I find enough to do. I feel that in a small way I continue to make a contribution.” De Klerk said all the agonising was over by the time he delivered his groundbreaking speech on February 2, 1990, which heralded the beginning of the end of apartheid, and that he believed in what he was announcing. “There was no other alternative … to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths and bring proper democracy to South Africa.” De Klerk, who quit politics in 1997, said he was not sad about having relinquished power or anything else. “I feel a sense of fulfillment.”