De Klerk’s prejudice laid bare
Reuters Mistake? Former presidents Nelson
Mandela, left, and |FW de Klerk hold up medals and certificates after
they were jointly awarded the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony held
at the Oslo City Hall in Norway on December 10, 1993. Political
considerations took the place of principle in deciding to honour De
Klerk jointly with Mandela, says the writer.
Picture: Reuters
The latest furore about statements made by
former apartheid president FW de Klerk has raised one very pertinent
point: the political considerations that go into the decisions regarding
the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. It also raises again the
circumstances in which that prize was jointly awarded to De Klerk and to
Nelson Mandela and seems to highlight the underlying prejudices of De
Klerk.
For, in the words of Mandela, just
a month before the award of the prize, De Klerk was guilty of “an act
of thuggery” and was “a man with blood on his hands”.
Such comments were made and
recorded, but little attention was paid to them, because uncomfortable
evidence was, by then, being swamped by a feel-good wave of rainbow
nation euphoria. Fact was fast becoming embedded in fantasy and a
simplistic promotion of reconciliation was the dominant theme.
As moves towards a negotiated
settlement in SA got solidly under way, it became clear that the Nobel
committee was in favour of the award to Mandela. But, as myth took the
place of calm, critical analysis, political considerations took the
place of principle.
Would not a joint award help to promote reconciliation and peace in SA?
Broad agreement was canvassed from
several leading anti-apartheid figures including, apparently, the 1984
recipient of the prize, then Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu. So it was
that the Nobel committee decided on the joint award to Mandela and De
Klerk.
They
were scheduled to travel separately to Oslo in December 1993 to have the
honour conferred on them. De Klerk, as the last apartheid president,
would fly in the presidential aircraft, calling in on various heads of
state along the way; Mandela would make his own way to the Norwegian
capital.
Then, on October 8, one of the
apartheid state’s hit squads, with the authorisation of De Klerk and his
top ministers, crossed the border into Transkei (then still nominally
independent), and murdered five schoolchildren. That massacre at 47 AC
Jordan Street in the Mthatha suburb of North Crest is now part of the
apartheid claims case scheduled to be heard in the US.
That October, De Klerk became the
first SA – and perhaps only – head of state, let alone Nobel Peace Prize
nominee, publicly to claim credit for a massacre. While the gunmen and
their immediate superiors remained a mystery, De Klerk announced that he
had ordered the destruction of “an Apla facility” in the Transkei.
The house in North Crest, he said,
was a base used by the Azanian People’s Liberation Army, the military
wing of the PAC, “to launch attacks on South Africa”.
This appeared to be a public
relations exercise calculated to reassure the restive right-wing
elements within the still ruling National Party that De Klerk was not
“going soft”. And De Klerk duly announced that he had been “fully
informed” of every aspect of the raid.
There was also no doubt of the
lethal success of the venture, for there were even colour photographs of
the bodies that De Klerk displayed.
The
police followed with a statement in which they said that the raid on the
North Crest house had been a “27-minute operation” and that the “five
terrorists” who had died had “offered resistance”.
These were lies. And they were
quickly exploded, largely through the work of Dumisa Ntsebeza, who was
then still a human rights lawyer based in Mthatha.
There was no evidence of any
resistance and the victims, shot on mattresses on the floor as they
slept before the television, were Samora and Sadat, the 16-year-old twin
sons of local butcher Sigqipo Mpendulo, and their friends, Thando
Mthembu, 17, and Mzwandile Mfeya and Sandiso Yose, both just 12. An
independent post-mortem later established that 16 bullets had been fired
into the body of Sadat Mpendulo, 11 into his twin, Samora, and that,
between them, Sandiso Yose and Mzwandile Mfeya had been shot 37 times.
Six bullets ended the life of Thando Mthembu.
Mandela was briefed about the
killings and, two weeks later, in a televised interview, stated: “For a
president to authorise the killing of children is a blatant act of
terrorism.”
He went on to note that De Klerk had not apologised and “did not have the decency to apologise”.
These statements tended to be
buried in the local media amid all the speculation about a negotiated
settlement and the prospect of the joint peace prize award.
Mandela,
too, did not raise the issue again, even when, just days before the
award ceremony in Oslo, a civil action demanding compensation for murder
from De Klerk, his foreign minister, Roelof “Pik” Botha, law and order
minister Hernus Kriel, as well as defence minister Kobie Coetsee was
lodged with the Transkei Supreme Court.
But no major newspaper, radio or
television station took up the issue. As Fergal Keane, then the BBC
correspondent in SA noted: “Who wants to bugger up a fairy tale?”
However, Mandela did state, on his way to Oslo, that De Klerk was a man
with “blood on his hands”.
A year later, De Klerk was to complain bitterly to American author and journalist Patti Waldmeir about the accusation.
He said he was horrified to be
labelled in this manner. It was unfair. Mandela had failed to understand
“the complexity of the situation”.
Later, and again without attendant
publicity, Mandela intervened and De Klerk was persuaded to offer
compensation to the families of the murdered children in exchange for
the civil murder case being dropped.
State money was allocated to pay
for the funerals and the legal costs of the families and to compensate
them for their loss. In the name of reconciliation, a convenient blanket
of silence fell over the massacre.
But
Mpendulo, father of the twins who were butchered by the death squad,
would not let the matter rest; he wanted to know who had pulled the
triggers, what was the chain of command, from De Klerk down – and how
erroneous information came to be acted on.
As a result, he was one of the
first claimants in the series of class action lawsuits lodged in New
York in 2002 against banks and companies that profited from the
apartheid system. He made it clear that he wanted the murder of his
children to be seen not as an isolated or aberrant act, but as a logical
extension of a system that made victims of millions of people.
That is the very point De Klerk
dismissed in his recent controversial interview in which he excused the
concept of apartheid as the recognition of historically justified ethnic
homelands that had, unfortunately, resulted in hurt and harm. It
provided evidence – if ever more was needed – that De Klerk persists in
promoting the apartheid mythology of a practically empty land colonised
by the “Afrikaners”.
It also seems that Mandela was
correct when he said in 1993 that “when it comes the blacks he (De
Klerk) is absolutely insensitive”.
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen