South Africa’s last white president, FW de Klerk, threw a 70th birthday party on Friday attended by fellow Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela, the man he freed from prison as apartheid crumbled.
”Around the world people recognise you as a historic peacemaker and nation-builder,” Mandela said.
Another South African Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was among the 200 guests who showed up at the celebratory dinner at a Cape Town hotel. Former US president George Bush also was invited, but did not attend.
The architects of South Africa’s multiracial democracy were relaxed and jovial as they posed for photographers. De Klerk declared that he had ”no regrets” about his life’s work — including ending all-white rule and the reign of his National Party.
Tutu said that De Klerk occupied a ”special niche in our history” for releasing Mandela and legalising the African National Congress.
”His readiness to negotiate with the liberation movements, for whatever reasons, undoubtedly saved our land from being overwhelmed by the bloodbath so many feared or predicted,” Tutu wrote in a message to The Associated Press.
”He should be saluted for those epoch-making initiatives and we wish him God’s richest blessings on his 70th birthday,” Tutu declared.
De Klerk’s birthday is on Saturday.
He took over as president from the hardline white nationalist PW Botha in 1989 and stunned the world six months later by freeing Mandela after 27 years in prison. He then engaged in negotiations that ended white-minority rule by his National Party and saw Mandela elected South Africa’s first black president in April 1994.
His efforts won him a share of the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela in 1993, and cost his National Party its place at the pinnacle of power. He served as deputy president in a power-sharing government led by Mandela, but quit the post in 1996 and resigned as party leader a year later, saying he wanted to help the National Party break with the past.
He left the renamed New National Party in 2004 after the party — which had lost nearly all its voter support — said it would merge with the ruling ANC.
Since then he has kept a low political profile. He and his wife live on a wine farm about 60km from Cape Town.
Far from retiring, he set up the London-based Global Leadership Foundation in March 2004 to try to promote peace, democracy and development. He also heads the Cape Town-based FW De Klerk Foundation, which tries to further understanding in ”multi-community countries.”
The foundation’s website says it is deeply committed to the continuation of ”the miracle” of South Africa’s peaceful and democratic transformation, which ”sets an example for the rest of Africa; and provides hope and inspiration for divided societies throughout the world”.
At the same time, De Klerk is a dogged defender of the rights of the white, Afrikaans-speaking minority, deemed most responsible for the evils of apartheid. His foundation recently announced plans for a constitutional rights advisory centre for those who felt discriminated against by affirmative action and black economic empowerment.
But De Klerk has no regrets about the reforms he masterminded.
”The new South Africa is a much better place now than had we tried to cling to a system which had become morally unjust,” he said in a 2004 interview with The AP. ”I am positive about our future.”
De Klerk had a highly publicised spat in 1999 with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated apartheid-era atrocities. He refused to apply for amnesty from the commission and was criticised by its chairperson, Tutu, for insisting he was unaware of widespread torture and brutality by government security forces when he was president.
Tutu once called De Klerk ”a small man lacking magnanimity and generosity of spirit”.
In his written tribute on Friday, Tutu said that De Klerk ”did blot his copybook somewhat” with his performance before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission but said he would be eternally grateful that De Klerk ousted PW Botha and so paved the way for change.
”South Africa was very fortunate, indeed blessed, that it was Mr de Klerk who was heading the National Party when he did and not his intransigent, stubborn, finger-wagging predecessor,” Tutu wrote. – Sapa-AP