Frederik Willem de Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid president, has died. He died last Thursday, the 11th, at 85 years of age, from cancer. He and Nelson Mandela shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, laureates for the deal that ended the South African racist dictatorship. Something less well known about de Klerk is that it was under his regime that a unique event in history to date occurred: a country voluntarily gave up its nuclear arsenal.
The image of South Africa’s most recent white president is more positive abroad than at home, a trait he shares with other leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev. The world sees Klerk as someone who had the courage and vision to break with the political structures that supported him and end the racist dictatorship of his country, which was living under international pressure and boycotts. This view has crystal-clear merits, but it is not unanimous within South Africa.
For part of the white population, the most radical, he was a traitor. There is no other word. He would be blamed for abandoning the supremacist and authoritarian structure that brought him to power and for having dissolved the homeland ofThe call, the Afrikaans national anthem. A new, multicolored flag, a new national anthem and the progressive end of racist institutions, all this would be his “fault”. Mainly, the vote of the “inferior” black population, including the election of the “terrorist” Nelson Mandela, a topic already discussed in our space.
For part of the black population, especially the younger ones, he only did “his duty” and acted only due to international pressure. Even so, their efforts would have been intentionally insufficient, doing little to prevent the violence of the democratic transition. Supposedly, say some more conspiratorial theories, the regime expected communal violence to escalate, justifying “military intervention” and an end to dialogue between the racist government and black movements.
Courage
The use of the term “racist” may seem repetitive, but it is the main characteristic of that regime, at all its levels. The places where you could hang out, walk, work, and even who you could marry were defined based on the skin color of the person who, in turn, had implications for pseudoscientific racial “theories”. The native population suffered tremendous violence in the name of a project for a country that resembled Nazi Germany more than any other government.
When talking about the life of a person of such political relevance, it is always important to remember that we are talking about human beings, not saints. In other words, de Klerk, like all of us, was a person limited by his ideas, his times, his virtues and his vices. That doesn’t negate the fact that he was a man of courage. And, in a way, it doesn’t matter what that columnist, the reader, or others might think. The one who classified him as a man of courage was precisely Mandela.
“You have demonstrated a courage that few have had in similar circumstances,” Mandela said in 2006. These are the words of a person who spent nearly thirty years in forced labor under the same apartheid regime. Few things can stand out from the fact that an enemy sees the value of his opponent. Interestingly, to say that de Klerk was the leader of an authoritarian and racist regime and that he was a person of courage in the circumstances imposed on him are not phrases that contradict each other.
At the time, de Klerk lamented and apologized for the existence of that regime. Now, on his death, his family has published a posthumous video in which he again apologizes. “I, without reservation, apologize for the pain, hurts, indignity and wounds that apartheid caused to blacks, pardos and Indians in South Africa.”, in a free translation. Probably sensing that the natural end of life was approaching, de Klerk recorded the video and instructed family members to release it only after his death.
Nuclear weapons
In 1979 South Africa was ruled by supremacist Pieter Willem Botha. He ruled the country from 1978 to 1989, the immediate predecessor of de Klerk. He was also defense minister from 1966 to 1981. If one can accuse Klerk of having faults, Botha had them in abundance and in much larger orders of magnitude. Radically and ostensibly racist, he was one of the first to denounce Klerk as a traitor to the white South African homeland. He died in 2006 without ever accepting the end of apartheid.
For Botha, South Africa faced a situation identical to that of Israel: a country surrounded by enemies. In this case, the black African population and the socialist regimes in Angola and Mozambique. Regional wars were fought in what is now Namibia, then a South African colony, Zimbabwe, then under a racist regime by the name of Rhodesia, and Zambia, which became independent as Northern Rhodesia. A mix of Cold War racism between socialist and pro-UK groups.
South Africa then needed to seek the same means of ensuring its survival as Israel. Read, a native arms industry and nuclear deterrence. For a variety of reasons, South Africa’s military industry has not flourished in the same way as Israel’s, but in 1979 a nuclear explosion was detected in the Indian Ocean. The so-called Candle Incident is the only nuclear detonation without a declared responsible, although it is clear and evident that it was a South African nuclear test.
With Israeli cooperation, South Africa manufactured at least six nuclear warheads between 1979 and 1988. The deterrent plan consisted of two steps. First, in case of imminent war with a neighboring country, South Africa would carry out an ostensible nuclear test in the Calaari desert, in a previously prepared location, very similar to that which existed in Serra do Cachimbo, Brazil. The purpose would be to dissuade the enemy from the war or else attract intervention by an ally, such as the US.
End of an arsenal
If the test was not enough, a conventional bombing could use a warhead against an enemy city. There was no need to develop ballistic missiles, as the targets were neighboring countries. Still, South Africa did test some rudimentary projectiles, a waste of resources. In 1988, however, the country signed peace with Angola and its main ally, Cuba. The following year, de Klerk came to power and called for the end of South Africa’s nuclear weapons program.
South Africa became party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as early as 1991, turned over all of its warheads to the International Atomic Energy Agency and accepted inspections. In 1994, when the first democratic elections were held, the South African nuclear program was already over. It was the only country that voluntarily gave up its arsenal in history. Another three, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, in addition to coming under pressure, would not have the resources to manage their inherited portions of the Soviet arsenal.
Merits to Klerk’s pacifist, then? Maybe not. Racism, curiously, was part of the calculation that led to the decision to end the South African nuclear program. Part of the apartheid state did not want to see a “black government” with nuclear weapons, fearing that such warheads might end up in neighboring hands. One of them was Andreas Liebenberg, one of the last commanders of the South African defense forces. The racial vision and the national vision clouded more than is imagined.
In interviews, de Klerk has admitted this kind of pressure but, he says, was not part of his decision. He also claims that some military personnel pressured him in the opposite direction, that of not giving up the nuclear arsenal. Unless he left memoirs and documents with his family to be published after his death, it will still take us a while to know everything that happened in that troubled period, in which he captained his country in turbulent waters, hardly navigable by anyone.
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