Frederik de Klerk is dead: South Africa’s last apartheid president

Frederik de Klerk is dead: South Africa’s last apartheid president

South Africa’s ex-president Frederik de Klerk has died. The last president of the apartheid era was instrumental in the abolition of racial segregation. Together with Nelson Mandela he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

South Africa’s ex-president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Frederik de Klerk has died. De Klerk succumbed to cancer in the morning and fell asleep peacefully, the foundation he founded said on Thursday. He was the last president of the racist apartheid system in South Africa and had campaigned for the abolition of racial segregation and the release of his future successor Nelson Mandela from prison in the early 1990s.

Frederik de Klerk and Nelson Mandela received the Nobel Peace Prize

De Klerk has long been considered extremely conservative and an advocate of the apartheid system. “He seemed to be the epitome of a man in the state apparatus,” Mandela described him in his autobiography. “Nothing in his past seemed to suggest a shadow of a reform spirit.”

In 1993 de Klerk and Mandela were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Twenty years later, de Klerk said in retrospect that his decision had averted “catastrophe”, freed whites from their “isolation and guilt” and enabled blacks to achieve “dignity and equality”.

Source From: Stern

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