Agents of freedom

Fredrik Williem de Klerk is the most important white politician in South African history. His monumental achievement, along with Nelson Mandela, eliminated apartheid and introduced to an amazed world, the concept of a rainbow nation. Yoseph asks this Noble Peace Prize winner if he would have done it differently today and shares with us why he did it in the first place. Read on.

Many of us know Nelson Mandela, a man who fought for freedom and democracy in South Africa. Mandela is seen as an African hero, and is highly praised for his contribution in ending apartheid in South Africa. He is South African, but he presents the scope of hope for African Democracy and civil liberty.
All of that came at a great price, and one of them was spending 27 years of his life in a South African prison.
Last week, I had the honor to be one of the few to hear from the man who released Nelson Mandela after 27 years: Frederik Willem de Klerk. De Klerk was the South African President for 5 years until Mandela succeeded him, and he shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela in 1993 for his work in ending apartheid.
During the Study Group of Tony Leon (former leader of The Democratic Alliance, the South African opposition party) at the Institute of Politics, I tried to squeeze myself into a room filled with enthusiastic students and faculty who were eagerly waiting to hear from de Klerk. Shortly after I got a seat, De Klerk walked in with his wife, and started his speech by mentioning the South African victory during the Rugby World Cup.
De Klerk is a man who has engraved his name in the history of South Africa. He engineered the end of South Africa's racial segregation where white people ruled and black people were oppressed. As a white pro-apartheid President who has been opposing reforms for most of his career, he changed the 46-year old regime that South Africa had. Many of us in that room were thinking, why did he do it? Just when I was about to ask him why he did it, a girl sitting two rows ahead of me raised her hand and confronted De Klerk with that question. He replied by saying how he felt that apartheid was wrong, and that his party (the National Party) failed justice. Without hesitation, he said that the reason they failed was because they were too selfish. But he also mentioned that it was a gradual process, and economic dependency was growing between the white population and the black population. He said that he saw a need to change, and he brought it. He ended his answer by saying, "Realization of the catastrophe was mainly responsible for the end of apartheid."
De Klerk didn't seem to be very pleased with the current political situation of South Africa. As we know, during the last elections the African National Congress had a landslide victory with very little opposition. As a pioneer to a democratic South Africa, he said, "democracy is healthy when there is opposition that can upset the leading party." He mentioned that the ANC had 70% of the votes, and 30% wasn't really opposition. He went on to give fatherly advice to Africa, saying "Africa has to get its house in order," so that the rest of the world can help African countries to move towards democracy.
After hearing his passionate speech and response to the questions, I finally got a chance to ask De Klerk a question. I have always seen a political position like the one De Klerk held as the seat where almost any decision made will make some happy and some unhappy. Some Presidents tend to learn from their misjudgments and others disregard the idea that they might have made some bad decisions. I asked De Klerk if there were a decision he made that he would have done differently.
Boldly, he told me that he would have released Nelson Mandela all over again, he would have ended apartheid, and help introduce democracy to South Africa. Although, he accepted that he would have improved on the timing of some of his decisions, and would have used different strategies, and even put more pressure for change. De Klerk is proud of what he had done during his presidency, and was responsible for bringing new light to South Africa during the last decade of the twentieth century.