Word: klerk
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...have to give Mr. De Klerk the benefit ofthe doubt," he said. "He has said in his speechthat what he is hoping to see is the emergence ofa new constitution which would entail universalsuffrage...the possibilities for a new start inour country are very strongly underlined andencouraged by what he said...
Tutu said he had told De Klerk in a meetingthat if South Africa complied with those demands,anti-apartheid forces "are going to say to ourfriends immediately, `implement this, liftsanctions...
Although he has been a National Party politician for 17 years and State President for the past five months, Frederik Willem de Klerk, 53, is still something of a cipher. His five-year plan for constitutional change, presented at the National Party congress last summer, is empty of specifics; his rhetoric is soothing but ambiguous and dotted with the charged code words of apartheid. Yet this mild, bland politician startled the nation upon taking office with a display of bold pronouncements and a previously undiscovered talent for doing the unexpected. Although the changes he has made are still largely cosmetic...
...Klerk duly went to law school, built a prosperous practice in the Transvaal and was ready for politics in 1972 when he was tapped by the Afrikaner elite to stand for Parliament. He served as a solid but undistinguished member of a host of committees, later becoming a dutiful Cabinet minister holding such portfolios as sports and home affairs. His closest brush with the wretchedness of apartheid came when he was Education Minister during the 1976 Soweto riots protesting compulsory Afrikaans instruction in the schools. He stood resolutely behind the principle of separate but equal -- in practice unequal -- education...
...Klerk was a late-blooming reformer. "All of us were very much committed to separate development," says Education Minister Stoffel van der Merwe, a friend and colleague. "Each of us at some time or other had to change his mind. Somewhere along the line De Klerk changed his." The futility of apartheid probably came to him in the same gradual way it dawned on many whites: as hundreds of thousands of blacks flooded the cities, separation was no longer practical...