FW de Klerk’s reputation has been under attack almost from the time he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with Nelson Mandela in 1993, a pattern the Mail & Guardian continued in its article “Neither saint nor saviour” (April 4), which questioned whether the accolade had been justly awarded.
A central accusation is this: that he must have known about all gross violations of human rights by the security forces during the apartheid years and during his presidency — even though these actions directly undermined his own policies.
He never held a security portfolio and was not a member of the inner circle that formulated security policy.
He was simply not aware of the activities of units such as the Civil Cooperation Bureau and the Vlakplaas police unit, neither was he informed of such activities after he became president. His claim is supported by the fact that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was unable to find any convincing references to any such activities in any Cabinet or State Security Council papers.
In fact, during his presidency he spent a great deal of time and effort trying to establish the truth or otherwise of persistent allegations regarding the existence of a shadowy “third force”. He appointed the Harms commission, the Goldstone commission and later gave air force General Pierre Steyn unprecedented powers to investigate all aspects of the defence force’s Military Intelligence operations.
De Klerk is also criticised for refusing to accept responsibility for apartheid-era human rights violations. This is not so. He unambiguously told the TRC on a number of occasions that “he accepted overall responsibility for the period of his leadership and, together with the Cabinet and the State Security Council, accepted joint responsibility for all the decisions that they took and the instructions that they gave, including all authorised actions and operations executed in terms of a reasonable interpretation of such instructions”.
What he could not accept was responsibility for actions aimed at undermining the transformation policies that he himself had initiated. To do so would be to admit that he had a double agenda during the negotiations, which is simply not true.
De Klerk is accused of having “snubbed” the TRC. That is also untrue. Only when it became clear that the TRC had decided to launch a major attack against his reputation was he forced on two occasions to approach the courts. In both court cases he was successful and chose to settle with the TRC so as not to delay the final report. The TRC agreed to pay a very substantial portion of his legal costs.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s statement that De Klerk could not see the intrinsic evils in apartheid simply does not jibe with the sincere and detailed apology for apartheid that he gave to the TRC.
De Klerk is also depicted as an unreconstructed conservative who was opposed to real reform. According to his critics he never really accepted the idea of majority rule and wished to retain “white privileges” by building a minority veto into the new Constitution.
Such critics confuse acceptance of the democratic principle that the majority should rule — which De Klerk has consistently accepted — with the concept of “majoritarianism” in terms of which a majority of one can decide to do what it pleases without paying any attention to the views, interests and wishes of minorities.
The reality is that De Klerk played a key role in initiating and managing the process that led to the demo-cratic transformation of South Africa. It would be naive of figures like De Klerk to imagine that they are immune to criticism and calumny.
Why then is it important to recognise De Klerk’s role in the transformation of South Africa? The answer to this question has little to do with De Klerk the individual and everything to do with De Klerk as the symbol and representative of the 69% of white South Africans who supported reform. In terms of the struggle analysis expounded by the TRC, all the governments from the past and the parties and institutions that supported them were more or less evil — to paraphrase Tutu
“no good fruit could possibly come from an evil tree”.
On the other hand, those who supported the struggle were more or less good — despite aberrations here and there — because their cause was just. Consequently, they should be given sole credit for the creation of the new South Africa. Whites, accordingly, should not really be viewed as the co-creators of the new South Africa with an honourable place at the table. Instead, they should be seen as a discredited and unjustifiably privileged minority whose only proper role in the new South Africa should be as supplicants for forgiveness and payers of reparations.
In terms of this analysis there is no room for a leader from the apartheid past who might have acted honourably in a sincere attempt to address and resolve the agonising problems of the country. There can be no acknowledgement of the Afrikaners’ historically unparalleled deed of expiation in terms of which they sacrificed centuries of struggle for self-determination to help create a new and non-racial South Africa.
This is deeply regrettable because it robs white South Africans of the feeling of belonging and enthusiastic participation that they felt in the heady days of 1994. And it perhaps helps to explain why 61% of white South Africans — according to a recent Institute for Justice and Reconciliation poll — believe that their children have little future in their own country.
Dave Steward is executive director of the FW de Klerk Foundation