Word: klerk
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...conservative, dark-suited son of Afrikanerdom, President Frederik Willem de Klerk could not have rocked the political world more when, in 1990, he unbanned the African National Congress, released Nelson Mandela and set South Africa on the road to the end of apartheid and a black-majority democracy. And when De Klerk, who with Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize for engineering the transition to a new South Africa, surprised his nation last week by announcing that he was retiring as head of the opposition National Party, South Africa had more to reflect on than his role in the historic...
...Klerk, 61, gave as a reason for his retirement the fact that despite his huge contribution to the salvation of his country, he is demonized as a symbol of the apartheid past and is therefore more of a liability than an asset to today's multiracial National Party. Last week he told TIME: "I've always adhered to the management philosophy that a top manager shouldn't be in the job too long." The remark was characteristically De Klerk: low key, declining the chance to paint himself as a large figure in history...
...attempted to shepherd his country through the process of negotiating an end to apartheid, President F.W. De Klerk liked to think of himself as South Africa's Mikhail Gorbachev ? bringing the equivalent of glasnost to the National Party. Of course, he was unaware that he would soon share Gorbachev's fate at the polls, where newly enfranchised voters rejected him as a symbol of the past. That loss has haunted him. Today the 60-year-old De Klerk resigned the leadership of what is now the main opposition party, believing it could not shed its racist image under his stewarship...
...Party leaders were shocked, nonetheless, since De Klerk remained the only NP leader with any significant support in the black population. Nelson Mandela was barely gracious in his praise of the man he had come to increasingly distrust in recent years ? particularly after De Klerk withdrew his party from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission probing the crimes of the apartheid era. Mandela's salute to his predecessor was barbed: "Whatever mistakes he may have made, and it is possible that he has made very fundamental mistakes as many of us have done, I hope South Africa will not forget...
...Despite all that has happened, De Klerk still seems to cling to the Gorbachev image. The first order of business in his post-political life is ? you've guessed it ? a book deal...