He officially ended apartheid and freed Nelson Mandela: Frederik de Klerk, Nobel Peace Prize winner, died at 85.
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“It is with the greatest sadness that the FW de Klerk Foundation announces the death of former President FW de Klerk peacefully this morning at his home in Fresnaye”, a suburb of Cape Town, announced its foundation on November 11 in a press release. He was said to have suffered from mesothelioma, a cancer that affects the tissues around the lungs in March, the very day of his 85th birthday.
“The time for negotiations has arrived”
With the reputation of a great conservative, it was in 1989 that Frederik De Klerk succeeded President PW Botha, weakened by a heart attack. On February 2, 1990, this National Party apparatchik, against all odds, declared before Parliament: “The time for negotiations has arrived.” It announces the unconditional release of ANC leader Nelson Mandela, in prison for 27 years, as well as the lifting of the ban on anti-apartheid parties. This decision truly launched the transition process which led four years later to the organization of the first multiracial elections in the country’s history, won by Mandela.
The two men jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for “their efforts for the peaceful demise of the apartheid regime and for the establishment of a new democratic South Africa”. Twenty years later, Frederik De Klerk will consider that his decision made it possible to avoid “a disaster”, taking the Whites out of their “isolation and their guilt” and allowing blacks to access “dignity and equality”.
Withdrawal from political life
He accompanied the young democracy for two years by becoming vice-president of the first black president in the country. But in 1996, he resigned, criticizing the new Constitution for not guaranteeing whites that they could continue to share power. The following year, he gave up the presidency of the National Party and began his retirement from political life. Born March 18, 1936, Frederik De Klerk has always evolved in Afrikaner nationalist circles, descendants of the first European settlers who speak a language derived from Dutch.
“He seemed to be the quintessence of the man of the apparatus (…) Nothing in his past seemed to indicate the shadow of a spirit of reform”
In 2020, he sparked a heated controversy by denying that apartheid was a crime against humanity, before apologizing.