The former South African president, who had released Nelson Mandela, died on Thursday, at age 85. He who had helped to change his country profoundly then tarnished his image by expressing a form of nostalgia towards a southern Africa.
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For a man who had the cran, in 1990, to give the decisive impulse to change a world, his world – that of South Africa, racist and violent – by engaging with the mechanics to terminate At Apartheid four years later, and who could have finished his existence from this courage, Frederik de Klerk did not age with grace. It had not escaped anyone: something constantly, seemed to irritate it, in this South Africa that he had helped to shape.
Obviously, he had a painful consciousness, when, shortly before going out, undermined by the terminal stage of his cancer, he had decided – strange – to record a declaration, his “last message” , destined to be posthumous. This video has been broadcast Thursday 11 November , a few hours after his death. Frederik Klerk, had just disappeared at age 85, but still had accounts to settle with posterity. The former South African President had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, together with Nelson Mandela, for bringing the country to multiracial democracy instead of sinking into a bloodbath. When, already, Humanity had chosen to opt for the best of itself? To get there, the will of these two men had not counted for nothing.
Why did it take Frederik from Klerk, taking from age, withdrawn from public affairs, multiplies unfortunate statements, ambiguous, about apartheid, the “separate development” policy whose ultimate goal was to live in different white and black areas? In his posthumous message, he defends himself to have been a nostalgic of this shameful past and wishes to “apologize for pain, indignity, deep injuries and destruction that apartheid has undermined blacks, people of mixed origin and South African Indians “. He apologized as an ex-officer of the party in power, but also to “individual title”, admitting – which in passing has never been of doubt – supporting this system in its “young years”.
Under the contrition, arises the Prosecution
And then the ghost of the video says that the Spirit who presided at the end of the apartheid is in danger, and his words are very fuzzy, very ambiguous when he slips that the responsibility must be detected Of all this current South African disorder in “ideologies”, or “positive discrimination”. Discourse known, and immediately recognizable, based on a criticism of the present, with its difficulties – unemployment, crime, looting of public companies (part of the country was immersed in the dark by rotating electricity cuts when the message was put Online) – attributable to black power. By a rhetorical flip-flop, under the contrition, arises the accusation.
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