De Klerk - the last white president of South Africa

Jim Hoagland:

I almost expected to feel the twirling in their graves of de Klerk's Afrikaner ancestors, who cursed the finding of gold on their land in 1867 because it would corrupt and endanger their nation and who imposed apartheid on South Africa in 1948. Their political heir had not only dismantled their artifice of prejudice but taken pride in turning power over to Mandela in 1994.
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A series of unexpected events "opened a window, through which we jumped," de Klerk says of the set of interconnected, rapid decisions South Africa's government began to make in the mid-1980s. Looming surprisingly large in those events was a 1988 U.S.-brokered agreement that led to the withdrawal of Cuban and Soviet forces from Angola and the eventual independence of Namibia.

"This reassured the South African government that it could secure its interests through negotiations," something no previous government had believed, de Klerk continued. The fall of the Berlin Wall a year later and the collapse of the Soviet Union removed deeply held fears of a foreign invasion supported by Moscow and of the influence of the South African Communist Party over Mandela's African National Congress.

De Klerk minimized the effect of trade embargoes and most other sanctions on his decisions. "We had enough oil stored in empty mines to last us four years of total embargo," he told me, suggesting that South Africa had no trouble finding countries that broke the embargo. "We even exported oil. . . . What did concern us were financial sanctions and threats to impound our airliners."

He also conceded that the prospect of majority rule helped influence his 1989 order to dismantle South Africa's nuclear arsenal, which was halted while work was underway on a seventh primitive weapon. "But I was always opposed to developing these 'dirty bombs.' Who would you use them against?"

De Klerk did not elaborate, but the implosion of the Soviet Union ended any possibility of using the bombs to blackmail the West into intervening to halt an invasion, as South African military planners originally intended.

But the driving forces for change were internal and were accelerated in 1986 when Afrikaner hardliners broke away into a new party rather than accept modest concessions to the black majority that de Klerk's National Party was considering. In the last all-white election in 1987, he developed an action program that would eventually lead to the cataclysmic changes represented by Mandela's release and the simultaneous dismantling of apartheid and the nuclear arsenal. "We were liberated to become a reform party when the right became the ultra right," de Klerk said.

Whites would have let go of apartheid long ago if the Soviet Union had not sent Cubans into Angola. They feared communism more than anything.