India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 05 :: Feb. 27 - Mar. 12, 1999

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BOOKS

South African introspection

A. G. NOORANI

The Last Trek - A New Beginning: The Autobiography by F.W. de Klerk; Macmillan; £9.99; pages 412.

THE book of memoirs of the last President of South Africa's white racist regime is instructive for four reasons. What were the considerations that prompted F.W. de Klerk to dismantle the regime and pave the way for a non-racist, democratic Republic headed by Nelson Mandela? Why did it acquire and then abandon nuclear weapons capability? The third reason is of direct relevance to all plural societies which are torn by ethnic conflict - reconciliation of the democratic principle of one man-one vote with the rights of minorities to participate in governance. Experience has shown that neither protection in law nor territorial partition provides a solution; only participation can. The process is essentially a political one, albeit buttressed by appropriate constitutional mechanisms. Lastly, how are the security forces to be kept in check in an insurgency situation?

South Africa's polity was fractured at birth. Besides the overwhelming majority of the population, the blacks, there were coloureds (persons of mixed descent), Indians and Europeans who themselves were equally divided between English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking people, who are the descendants of the Boers. In 1910, after the Anglo-Boer War, the two British colonies in South Africa (Natal and the Cape Colony) and the two old Afrikaner republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) came together to form the new Union of South Africa. Almost from the beginning there were sharp differences within the coalition that won the first general elections. On the one hand there were those, including many Afrikaners, led by General Louis Botha and General Jan Smuts, who wished to work for a united white nation of Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans within the British Empire. They subsequently formed the South African Party. Opposed to them there were those led by General Barry Hertzog, who cherished the ideals of Afrikaner nationalism. In 1914 they formed the National Party. Both were racist. The repressive apparatus of the apartheid state was built after 1948 when the Afrikaners' National Party, led by D.F. Malan, defeated Jan Smuts.

De Klerk, who traces his roots to his ancestors in the Netherlands, grew up as an Afrikaner. His book seeks to "create perspective on the motivating forces behind the development of political attitudes." Afrikaners dreamt of independence from British rule but overlordship over others. "The story of the Klerks was the story of the emerging Afrikaner nation... a predominantly Dutch speaking community with roots in Europe, but with its heart in Africa and its eyes set on an independent future."

The author was no rebel. A product of the system, he prospered by it. Only unlike most he was quick to perceive the rot that lay within. "It was the ideal to which I myself had clung until I finally concluded, after a long process of deep introspection, that, if pursued, it would bring disaster to all the peoples of my country - including my own."

BROUGHT up in a certain ethos, many people do not perceive the wrongs the system that enriches them inflicts on others. They rationalise them. F.W. de Klerk writes: "Most nations throughout the centuries have been prepared to pursue their own interests at the expense of others. Nearly always they have found some means of rationalising their actions by cloaking them in some self-justifying doctrine. Until the middle of the century, racial discrimination was more the norm than the exception that governed the interaction between peoples of different races throughout the world. For most of its existence the British Empire openly and unashamedly applied a colour bar against most of its non-white subjects." People ought to know in India.

Remarkably, even now he credits apartheid with some idealism. "Our desire is that indigenous black cultures should be nurtured and developed and that they should not be swamped by the more powerful economic and technological forces of the Western materialistic culture."

De Klerk shared the beliefs of the whites during the worst days of apartheid but his "discomfort" over its consequences grew; especially after personal interaction with the coloureds and Indians. "For many years the official policy of the National Party was that Indians should be repatriated to India." Apartheid was "constitutionalised" in 1985 with its tricameral system (whites, coloureds and Indians). De Klerk still sings its praises. In February 1986 he said that "recognition of the existence of different groups was not discriminatory. It was a God-given reality."

Three years later, on September 14, 1989, de Klerk was elected President. On October 10, he announced the release of the last of the political prisoners, paving the way for that of the most famous of them all. On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela was released.

The author does not explain as fully as one might have hoped how the change came about between February 1986 and October 1989. Secret negotiations between Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) and the Government had been held in Britain and Switzerland even before de Klerk became President.

Obviously, more than one factor accounted for the change. "I realised at the outset of my presidency that one of the greatest challenges that we would face during the coming years would be to improve the parlous state of our economy. We had to wrestle with the aftermath of isolation and the political uncertainties that had been unleashed by the process of transformation. Our isolation had caused major distortions in our economy... Our industries had grown sluggish after years of protection from foreign competition. To add to our woes, our opponents frequently used the economy as a political battleground by trying to delay the lifting of sanctions and by launching politically motivated strikes and stay-aways."

The system was not working and it was doubt about its future in the minds of the ruling class itself that prompted change. Sixty-nine per cent of whites were to endorse de Klerk's policy in the referendum held in 1992. The ANC's steadfast refusal to compromise by working the system, with agreed reforms, doomed its future. In 1985, President P.W. Botha had offered to release Mandela. "Instead, the ANC had decided at its National Consultative Conference in Kabwe, Zambia, in June 1985, that the time had come to lead the people in raising the level of struggle to that of a people's war for the seizure of power."

Although very many apartheid laws were repealed after 1987, its main pillars survived - the continued classification of the population according to race; the lack of full black participation in political decision-making processes; and the maintenance of separate residential areas, schools and hospitals for different races.

Meanwhile, Botha had developed "the concept of a total strategy" to counter the ANC by "unconventional methods." The author admits: "Revelations during the past few years clearly show that at some stage, and in some manner outside the formal meetings of the State Security Council and the Cabinet, the scope of these unconventional and covert strategies was expanded to include actions which did lead to gross violations of human rights, including murder and torture. A number of key UDF (United Democratic Front) and ANC activists were assassinated. Many of the detainees who were held without trial during the state of Emergency were tortured and mistreated, despite the provision that magistrates should regularly be permitted to visit them. It also appears that some elements within the Inkatha Freedom Party were helped to wage an undeclared war against the ANC..."

These revelations were to create bad blood between Mandela and de Klerk during the peace process and in the Government of National Unity that was set up when Mandela became President on May 10, 1994. The pattern is a familiar one - establish a government-backed force on the lines of those set up by Latin American dictators and in Spain comprising surrendered militants and turn them on their former colleagues, with the licence to kill.

They failed, and it is the failure of the gambler's last throw that speeded change. De Klerk claims: "I still do not know the full truth about all these charges, or who within the security forces authorised these gross violations of human rights. Certainly they were never discussed at any meeting of any body that I ever attended. I am also sure that - like me - the great majority of my Cabinet colleagues had no knowledge of such activities until they were exposed in the media; by the Goldstone Commission on Public Violence, which I myself appointed in 1992; by the investigation of the Military Intelligence Division of the SADF (South African Defence Force) which I ordered General Steyn to carry out in November 1992 or by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. When I became state President and assumed supreme command of the security forces, the ministers of defence and of law and order, the chief of the defence force and the commissioner of the South African police did not inform me of these activities in the course of the general briefings that I was given - despite the fact that some of them continued to operate for some time during my presidency."

There never was any doubt in Mandela's mind about the need to reassure whites about their future and he said as much to de Klerk when they met in secret for the first time on December 13, 1989: "... in March the year before he had sent President Botha a memorandum in which he had said that two broad issues would have to be addressed during negotiations: the ANC's demand for majority rule in a unitary state and the insistence of whites on structural guarantees that majority rule would not mean domination of the white minority by blacks."

De Klerk deserves full recognition for his realism, firmness of purpose and the courage to usher in change. He knew that greater repression would spell disaster; that the status quo was unstable; and that change would not spell danger to whites. The doubts he had developed but kept to himself in earlier years now hardened into conviction and he moved with remarkable political skill.

SASA KRALJ/AP
Former South African President F.W. de Klerk.

A STATE under perpetual siege, white South Africa had become paranoid. On March 24, 1993, de Klerk announced his decision "to dismantle a nuclear weapons capability". But why did the country go nuclear at all? "The decision to do so was taken in 1974, against the background of the Soviet expansionist threat in southern Africa, the deployment of Cuban forces in Angola from 1975 onwards and the knowledge that because of our international isolation, we would not be able to rely on outside assistance in the event of an attack" - as if nuclear weapons could have been used against Moscow. Not surprisingly, "Our nuclear programme was never discussed in the Cabinet or the State Security Council and was managed on a strictly need to know basis."

De Klerk was fortunate in having Nelson Mandela as a partner. But, here, de Klerk's realism deserts him. Mandela's credibility depended on his consistency. He could be magnanimous which, indeed, he was. But he could not wipe out the past; least of all betray his people. Moreover, even after his release the security forces continued with their old ways. There existed "a third force", an underground outfit of the SADF, called the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB).

De Klerk's professions of ignorance may be accepted. What is unacceptable is his resentment at Mandela's justifiably angry reaction as disclosure upon disclosure piled up. De Klerk appointed Judge Louis Harms in January 1990 to probe political murders. In July 1991 came Inkathagate - the Government had been providing clandestine assistance for some time to the Inkatha Freedom Party of Mangosuthu Buthalezi. On November 16, 1992, the Goldstone Commission exposed the Directorate of Covert Collection, "an ultra-secret" branch of Military Intelligence. There was a Vlakplaas Unit comprising ANC members who had come over to the government side which went about fomenting violence. Judge Goldstone exposed it on February 20, 1994. The Chief of Defence Force Staff, Lt. Gen. Peire Steyn, informed de Klerk in December 1992 of a "veritable rat's nest of unauthorised and illegal activity within military intelligence." This was done in private, unknown to Mandela.

What Mandela saw was the killing of his own men even while the peace process was afoot. The assassination of Chris Hani, secretary-general of the Communist Party, on April 10, 1993 could have ignited a major crisis. Mandela saw to it that it did not. In a moving broadcast, he said: "Tonight, I am reaching out to every single South African, black and white, from the very depth of my being. A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster. A white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, the assassin...."

PETER ANDREWS/ REUTERS POOL/ AP
South African President Nelson Mandela.

The course of the peace process with its many milestones - Declaration of Intent, Record of Understanding and the Interim Constitution - needs no recounting. (M. S. Prabhakara has done that most ably in Frontline.) What needs emphasis is that the principle of consensus, as distinct from the operation of the brute majority, prevailed throughout. It was the accord on power-sharing that paved the road to the success of the process. If such an accord had been reached in 1946, India could not have been partitioned.

The memoirs end on a sour note. De Klerk withdrew from the Government in June 1996, shortly after the promulgation of the new Constitution on May 8, and retired from politics in August 1997. He had felt left out. It is too early to pronounce a judgment on the differences between President Mandela and his deputy which led him to bow out . But it is not too early to hold that regardless of the rights and wrongs, each had played his role superbly in the decisive moments of South Africa's transition to the new order.

De Klerk deserves full praise for his role. He provides a case study of the perils posed by the security forces once they are unleashed on a hapless people.

The autobiography reads extremely well. One hopes for a full account of the constitutional events from February 11, 1990 when Mandela was released and May 8, 1996 when the new Constitution came into force; in particular the working of the Congress for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa). It is one of the most remarkable success stories of our time.