The politician and Nobel Peace Prize winner who ushered in the end of the apartheid regime was 85 years old.
South Africa’s former president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Frederik Willem de Klerk is dead. De Klerk, who initiated the abolition of South Africa’s racist apartheid regime in 1989 with a radical reform course, died at the age of 85, the FW de Klerk Foundation announced. It was said that he peacefully succumbed to the fight against the disease in his house in the tourist metropolis of Cape Town on Thursday morning. He was diagnosed with cancer in March.
De Klerk’s name was inextricably linked with Nelson Mandela, with whom he shared the Nobel Prize. The Cape State was internationally isolated in the 1980s because of the systematic separation of blacks and whites. De Klerk was with Mandela as a man of a peaceful transition – even if later, similar to Mandela, a reassessment of his historical merits began.
At the time, he argued to his National Party that with the loss of Soviet support, the communist forces among the blacks would have lost their power base. There is now perhaps one last chance for the white minority to help shape the conditions for peace while they are still in power. Looking back, de Klerk was able to say in 2003: “I could still be president today. But then I would have had to walk over corpses, over thousands of corpses. And it would have been for a cause that is morally unjustifiable.”
In October 1993 de Klerk and Mandela were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their willingness to reconcile and “their personal integrity and great political courage”. In the first democratic elections in 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) won, as expected, a majority with 62 percent of the votes, de Klerks NP got a good 20 percent of the votes. In the unity government under Mandela, de Klerk became one of two vice-presidents, but quickly lost influence.
The ANC as a party could not make peace with “FW” until the end. At the suggestion of the Cape Town city administration to rename the city highway below Table Mountain to “FW de Klerk Boulevard”, the ruling party decided in 2016 brusquely: “He was part of apartheid. He cannot be a messiah.”
De Klerk leaves behind his second wife Elita, his children Jan and Susan and grandchildren, the foundation announced.