Opinion: F.W. de Klerk was neither a liberal nor a reformer. But he was a pragmatist – The Globe and Mail

FW de Klerk, South Africa's last white president, has died at age 85, his foundation announced on Nov. 11.TREVOR SAMSON/AFP/Getty Images

Richard Poplak is a Canadian author and journalist based in Johannesburg.

The list of Nobel Peace Prize laureates includes some ghoulish recipients, not a few of whom subsequently used their prize as a bloody cudgel. But heres a weird one: in 1993, the Nobel committee decided to split the Nobel between South Africas liberation hero (and soon-to-be head of state), Nelson Mandela, and apartheids last president, Frederik Willem de Klerk. The award was given during the sepia-tinted period of racial reconciliation that is alleged to have defined South Africas democratic transition. But as the years have worn on, apartheids violent death grunts have been parsed more thoroughly, and de Klerks inclusion on the Nobel list prompts an unwelcome question: what is it that you mean by peace, exactly?

Mr. de Klerk passed away this week at the age of 85. Known as FW to both his friends and enemies, he grew up in the eye of the system: his father was one of the architects of institutional apartheid, having served as a well-known National Party minister in successive cabinets. A lawyer by training, FW first entered the all-white House of Assembly in 1972, and never looked back. He was the young, hawkish face of the National Party, a weapons-grade debater who served, just like his old man, in successive ministerial roles.

Even if we were to employ the loosest interpretation of the term liberal, Mr. de Klerk never came close. Nor was he a reformer. He served the apartheid regime as an apartheid devotee, helping to craft, calibrate and occasionally soften its policies (the latter usually for optical purposes). He was an unabashed Afrikaner supremacist, a virulent anti-communist, and conservative about pretty much everything else. But he was also a pragmatist entranced by the laissez-faire neoliberalism promulgated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, both of whom later became ardent de Klerkian admirers.

Imagine if South Africa could have both racial segregation or, rather, entrenched economic rights for the white minority and open markets! This was heresy in the fading light of Prime Minister P.W. Bothas brutal tenure, as South Africas townships became more restive and the regime instituted a total onslaught against the forces of liberation. Nelson Mandela was in jail, his African National Congress (ANC) party was banned, a State of Emergency was in effect. But cooler heads in the National Party ran the numbers, and following the imposition of international economic sanctions in the 1980s, the countrys books were solidly in the red. When Mr. de Klerk became president in 1989, he had one choice. South Africa was broke and broken; apartheid was in triage. It was time to midwife a new dispensation into being.

After he freed Mr. Mandela, unbanned the ANC and terminated institutional segregation, far too much was made of Mr. de Klerks moral fortitude. Far too little was made of his brilliance as a political strategist. While lesser intellects in his cabinet wailed as institutional white supremacy was dismantled around them, shadowy forces linked to the government stoked black-on-black violence, creating a volatile and bloody stage for the theatre of transition. How much Mr. de Klerk knew of the civil wars architecture is still in dispute; nonetheless, at least 10,000 people died over the course of his five-year presidency.

Ultimately, what Mr. de Klerk wanted was a hand in negotiating the constitution, the final draft of which was to be written by those in power following the first free elections in April 1994. The miracle of that celebrated process was not Mr. Mandelas improbable rise from unjustly-imprisoned revolutionary to president, but the fact that the National Party managed to garner more than 20 per cent of the national vote, mostly from the white and mixed-race populations. This is one of the most stunning electoral victories of all time, and it effectively gave the National Party say over the final constitution most notably the rights that would bar economic redress or reparations for black South Africans.

Mr. de Klerk had won. But he wasnt a sportsman about it. He never acknowledged the National Partys brutality. Nor did he fully his word agree with the United Nations designation of apartheid as a crime against humanity. He served a truculent presence beside Mr. Mandela as one of his two deputy presidents, and vacated that office in a huff in 1996.

As for the atrocities committed during his tenure, he always remained tight-lipped. He had a chance during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process to come clean, to provide at least some succour to the victims of the regime he helped run. He refused. Just before he died, he recorded a video that provides something of a posthumous apology, but it plays like legacy-protecting revisionism, a de Klerkian specialty.

Hes taken many secrets, and a Nobel Peace Prize, to the grave. Hopefully both prove more useful in the afterlife.

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Opinion: F.W. de Klerk was neither a liberal nor a reformer. But he was a pragmatist - The Globe and Mail