BRENDAN BOYLE, Johannesburg | Thursday
FORMER South African President FW de Klerk has broken a long silence to warn that the racial harmony that marked the transition from apartheid to democracy is starting to crumble.
De Klerk, the white Afrikaner who handed power to Nelson Mandela in 1994, said in a statement that whites, mixed-race coloureds and Asians were feeling alienated and increasingly afraid.
“The positive relations that we experienced in 1994 are beginning to unravel,” he said in response to President Thabo Mbeki’s analysis of post-apartheid race relations.
De Klerk and Mandela shared a Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of their success in leading South Africa peacefully from white minority rule to democracy.
Opening a four-day conference on racism, Mbeki said this week that whites had a special responsibility to acknowledge and fight racism in South Africa’s young democracy.
“Our transition to a non-racial democracy in 1994 … has not ended the inherited racist, discriminatory and inequitable divisions of our country and people,” Mbeki said.
Whites, coloureds and Asians remain generally more wealthy than the four-to-one black majority six years after blacks won the right to vote.
De Klerk agreed with Mbeki’s description of South Africa as a country of two nations, one rich and white and the other black and poor, but said the answer lay in better communication between leaders and communities of South Africa’s diverse ethnic groups.
“The temperature of the national debate is rising. There appears to be little real communication and exchanges are increasingly characterised by insults and angry charges of racism.”
De Klerk, who became president of South Africa’s last white government in 1989 and repudiated apartheid a year later, has established a foundation to promote racial and social harmony.
While Mbeki had argued that the distribution of wealth remained skewed in favour of whites, De Klerk said this perception was an example of black defensiveness.
“Many black South Africans see the relative wealth of whites not as a result of hard work and enterprise, but as the ill-gotten fruits of apartheid. They increasingly regard any form of criticism or opposition from their white compatriots as racism,” De Klerk said.