Word: klerk
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After the 1994 election that resulted in majority rule by Nelson Mandela's A.N.C., the National Party under former president F.W. de Klerk was part of a government of national unity. It was an uneasy alliance that lasted only two years. Now, calling themselves the New National Party and under new leadership, the Afrikaans-speaking nationalists - mostly descended from white Dutch and other European settlers - are openly talking of joining with the A.N.C...
...names since 1914 and ruled, without interruption, from 1948 to 1994, during which time it put racial segregation - apartheid - into the statute book before being forced, by world pressure and internal black dissent, to remove it. In order to survive, the party has had to make many changes. De Klerk resigned from the post-apartheid government and the party because, he said, he did not want to be a part of the "apartheid baggage of the past." He was replaced by Van Schalkwyk, an articulate 37-year-old managerial whiz kid, whose boyish, bespectacled appearance soon earned...
...Andre du Toit, a professor of political studies in South Africa, has written, de Klerk's Cabinet, as late as June 1990, accepted the "need-to-know" principle for security operations, though they also claimed that ministers should accept full accountability for "special projects." Unsurprisingly, this blatant contradiction resulted in some agents keeping their superiors in the dark about certain activities...
...plea of innocence, de Klerk invoked the name of God to reinforce his claim: "I have a clear conscience with my God." However, it appears that the god of the apartheid government and the god of those that were oppressed by apartheid is as different as Blacks were from Whites in the old South Africa...
...Klerk's denials of responsibility for the atrocities and human rights violations by security forces ultimately under his command must be disputed. We should not forget that he held the highest position as president and, as such, bears ultimate responsibility for the actions of his subordinates, whether he knew about each individual crime or not. De Klerk presents himself as a "reformer" and a peacemaker, but we need to expose him for the person he really...