S. Africa’s De Klerk Steps Down

In his final address to Parliament, F. W. de Klerk outlined the challenges facing South Africa on Tuesday from the same podium where he announced the release of Nelson Mandela seven years ago.

It was an anti-climatic conclusion to the former president’s 25 years as a lawmaker for the whiteled National Party, which chose a young, conservative Afrikaner to succeed him as party leader earlier in the day.

Most legislators stood and applauded de Klerk after the speech, but some members of Mandela’s governing African National Congress booed.

Earlier, the ANC derided the choice of Marthinus van Schalkwyk, 37, as de Klerk’s successor, saying the selection amounts to “just more of the same.”

The National Party, which began apartheid in 1948, is seeking to expand its power base beyond the Dutch-descended Afrikaner minority that controlled the government for more than four decades.

But revelations of abuses during the apartheid era appear to doom any hope the party has of gaining broad support in a nation with a 75 percent black majority.

De Klerk, 61, said in his speech that South Africa faces key challenges in education, unemployment and building the country into a nation where all its citizens felt accepted and safe.

“In the new era which my life now enters, I shall try to bring my full part to achieve these goals,” he said.

When he became president in 1989, de Klerk was widely viewed as a moderate expected to protect apartheid. Instead, he declared soon after taking office that “white domination will have to disappear, otherwise there will never be peace in South Africa.”

On Feb. 2, 1990, de Klerk announced Mandela would be freed from 27 years’ imprisonment and the ANC legalized to negotiate the end of apartheid.

Four years later - and four months after de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela - voters overwhelmingly supported the ANC in the nation’s first all-race election.

Since then, the National Party has lost support and suffered internal divisions, with moderate members leaving to form a new party.

Without change, there has been speculation it could be relegated to the status of a fringe party with influence mainly in Western Cape, the only one of South Africa’s nine provinces it managed to win in 1994.

De Klerk announced last month he was stepping down to give the party a chance to regroup before the next national election in 1999. He said he would continue to support the party while working on his autobiography and acting as an elder statesman.

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