Word: klerk
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...approach. And after painstaking preliminaries, the most famous prisoner in the world was escorted, in the greatest secrecy, to the State President's office to start negotiating not only his own release but also the nation's transition from apartheid to democracy. On Feb. 2, 1990, President F.W. de Klerk lifted the ban on the A.N.C. and announced Mandela's imminent release...
Some will recall that soon after being released from prison by former South African president F.W. De Klerk, citizen Nelson Mandela did a fundraising tour of the United States. To tremendously understate the case, his effect upon American audiences was dramatic. Few could have been left unimpressed by Mandela's uncanny strength of spirit after 27 years in prison, an amount of time spent under conditions that would have wholly sapped a lesser person...
...Klerk who held together a party long divided between conservatives and moderates--in the Afrikaans parlance the verkramptes (inflexible right wing) and verligtes (enlightened moderates). In May one of the National Party's leading verligtes, Roelf Meyer, whom De Klerk had appointed head of a task team to redesign the party for the future, resigned when his ideas, including the disbanding of the party altogether, were rejected as too radical. Meyer, 50, heads a movement that will form a new political party later this month with a black group led by an ex-anc dissident. De Klerk believes Meyer...
...departure of De Klerk, who has been described as South Africa's Gorbachev because he began a reform process that swept him from power, is unlikely to have any effect on the powerful majority commanded by the ANC. But, says De Klerk, a reformed and renewed all-race National Party has a leading role to play in the restructuring of the political landscape in South Africa. There is a belief in the opposition camp, meanwhile, that like De Klerk, the National Party could become a victim of its own reforms...
...cleared his desk, he was asked how he would like to be remembered. De Klerk reached higher than usual: "As a leader who prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths and who made a quantum leap that fundamentally changed our country for the better and brought justice to all South Africans." Fair enough...