South Africa's De Klerk Bows Out of Politics

By ANN M. SIMMONS

Aug. 27, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Frederik W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president and the man who led the dismantling of apartheid, resigned as leader of the opposition National Party on Tuesday and stepped out of the political limelight.

In a surprise announcement, De Klerk, 61, told a packed news conference in Cape Town that he is retiring because “it is in the best interest of the party and the country.”

Ending a political career that spanned almost a quarter of a century, De Klerk--who shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with President Nelson Mandela for his role in bringing democracy to South Africa--also threw into question the future of the party that institutionalized racial discrimination there and nurtured it for 46 years.

“This party must continue with new, fresh ideas, with new, young leadership which can take us forward,” he said. “A significant obstacle for the National Party is the perception that . . . it is still linked to a guilt-laden past. . . . That symbol is removed now.”

De Klerk urged his followers to continue supporting the National Party, which he said remains the only one that can “take care of your interests.” Under De Klerk, the party opened its doors to all races.

It was De Klerk--the scion of a politically prominent Afrikaner family--who in 1990 lifted a 30-year-old ban on Mandela’s African National Congress, or ANC, and nine days later freed Mandela from prison, where he had served 27 years of a life sentence for sabotage against the white-led government.

Mandela, hearing Tuesday’s news, was gracious. “I only hope South Africans will not forget the role De Klerk played in effecting a smooth transition from our painful past to the dispensation South Africa enjoys today,” he told reporters.

A statement from the ANC called De Klerk’s decision a “recognition of the obvious reality that the captains of apartheid cannot easily transform themselves into co-architects of the new South Africa.”

“I think he realized that his time had come to get out of the political race with honor,” said Mark Malan, a senior researcher at Johannesburg’s Institute for Security Studies.

The National Party’s governing body issued a statement indicating surprise at De Klerk’s decision but dismissed suggestions that he had been forced out.

The National Party is in disarray today, plagued by political infighting that has led to a host of defections by moderate members. Some observers read De Klerk’s departure as a sign that the party may revert to its traditional hard line.

When De Klerk became president in 1989 after having served as a member of Parliament and, among other Cabinet posts, as education minister--presiding over a school system that spent 10 times more on white children than on black ones--supporters assumed he would protect the apartheid regime. Instead, the former lawyer shocked the nation by announcing that white domination had to end for South Africa to enjoy real peace.

Within a year, he legalized 60 anti-apartheid groups, including the ANC, and freed hundreds of political prisoners. After liberating Mandela, he removed the notorious legislative pillars of apartheid and began talks on a transition to democracy, in effect negotiating himself out of power.

Mandela’s party defeated De Klerk’s in a landslide in the 1994 national election, the first to include voting by all races and the one that ended 350 years of minority rule. De Klerk became one of two deputy presidents in Mandela’s government of unity. But he pulled his party out of the coalition once South Africa’s new constitution was approved in May 1996.

De Klerk set out on a crusade to remake the party. But “it was never clear what he was trying to do,” said Laurie Nathan, executive director of the Center for Conflict Resolution at the University of Cape Town. “How does he play the role of national leader committed to reconciliation and at the same time advance the interests of his political party?”

“He may have wanted to win black support, but it was not possible to shed the National Party’s legacy,” Nathan added.

De Klerk had hoped to broaden his party’s appeal to lure South Africans unhappy with the ANC. When he conceded defeat to Mandela in 1994, De Klerk, ever the consummate politician, vowed that his party would make another run for the presidency in 1999. But his efforts to enlarge the party failed.

“These days, the NP is trying to be everything to everybody who is not in the ANC and has ended up being nothing unto anyone,” said Malan, the researcher.

Like most other white leaders of the apartheid era, De Klerk refused to apply for amnesty for crimes committed in the name of white rule. Last spring, he enraged the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the panel created to record the ordeal of the system’s victims, by blaming torture and other atrocities on low-ranking officials.

He has maintained that he did not know about such deeds perpetrated by police death squads and other security forces.

Analysts said De Klerk’s likely successor, due to be picked Sept. 9, is either Hernus Kriel, the Western Cape provincial premier and a leader of the party’s right wing, or the party’s executive director, Marthinus van Schalkwyk.

De Klerk will keep his position until that selection is made and then plans to work on his autobiography, he said. “I would like to be remembered positively as one of the leaders who at the right time did the right thing,” he said.

A National Party spokesman, who asked not to be named, said there could be more resignations in coming weeks, but he did not elaborate.

De Klerk, known by friend and foe alike as “F. W.,” was one of the most important white politicians in his country’s history.

The nephew of a prime minister and son of a Cabinet minister, he was 12 years old when the National Party came to power in 1948, and he once recalled that he stayed up all night to hear the election returns. He was still in high school when the party, citing the Bible as its moral support, set out to engineer a new society by legalizing racial discrimination.

De Klerk earned a law degree and practiced for a time. But he soon was drawn to politics, the family trade.

As national education minister under Pieter W. Botha, De Klerk showed signs of being a conservative. But soon after Botha suffered a stroke and De Klerk won a narrow party election to succeed him, it became clear that De Klerk was less interested in hard-core political ideology than in political pragmatism. Friends and colleagues always described him as nutger, or “sober-minded” in his native Afrikaans.

Despite, and perhaps because of, his conservative credentials, he managed in 1989 and 1990 to do what many thought impossible. He unlocked the chains of black leaders, freed black political groups and, most important, persuaded the majority of whites to accept an all-race democracy in a country where they were outnumbered 5 to 1.

Simmons reported from Nairobi, Kenya.

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The De Klerk Years

Former South African President Frederik W. de Klerk oversaw the country’s dismantling of a whites-only political system.

* Born March 18, 1936 in Johannesburg

* Graduates from law school, 1958

* Private law practice in Vereeniging, South Africa, 1961-72

* Elected member of South Africa’s House of Assembly, 1972

* Minister of posts and telecommunications, 1978-79

* Minister of mineral and energy affairs, 1980-82

* Minister of internal affairs, 1982-84

* Minister of home affairs and national education, 1984-89