Last night at the opening of SONA, FW de Klerk, former President and Nobel Peace Laureate, and his wife Elita had to endure wave after wave of vitriolic attacks by Julius Malema and EFF members of Parliament.

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EFF ATTACK ON FW DE KLERK AT THE OPENING OF SONA
Last night at the opening of SONA, FW de Klerk, former President and Nobel Peace Laureate,
and his wife Elita had to endure wave after wave of vitriolic attacks by Julius Malema and EFF
members of Parliament, clad in their trademark red boiler suits. They claimed that his hands
were dripping “with blood”, including the blood of those who had been slaughtered at
Boipatong. Worst of all, FW de Klerk had denied - in a TV interview the previous week - that
apartheid was “a crime against humanity.” Their demands that he should be removed from
the chamber were rejected by the Speaker, Thandi Modise. De Klerk - who will turn 84 next
month - sat impassively in the public gallery as he watched the spectacle below.
De Klerk has repeatedly acknowledged the grave injustices committed under apartheid and
has sincerely apologised on a number of occasions to those who suffered under previous
governments. These were more than empty words: he dedicated his entire presidency to the
abolition of apartheid and the negotiation of a new Constitution that would entrench the
rights of all South Africans regardless of race. He oversaw the process that culminated in the
repeal of all the remaining apartheid laws.
But was apartheid a crime against humanity?
First we have to look at the origins of the charge: In November 1966 the UN General Assembly
declared apartheid to be a crime against humanity - and in 1973 it adopted the Convention on
the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.
Both the Resolution and the Convention were political initiatives of the Soviet Union - which
had itself committed atrocious crimes against humanity that involved the killing of millions of
people. In 1976, when the Convention came into force, 23 of the 31 signatories were,
according to Freedom House in New York, “not free”. Six were partly free - and only two were
free. Ironically, South Africa was classified as “partly free” - and had a better human rights
score than 27 of the signatories.
The 109 states that subsequently joined the Convention included none of the core
democracies. According to the United States delegate:
“Deplorable as it is, we cannot, from a legal point of view, accept that apartheid can
in this manner be made a crime against humanity. Crimes against humanity are so
grave in nature that they must be meticulously elaborated and strictly construed
under existing international law...”
The idea that apartheid was ‘a crime against humanity’ was, and remains, an ‘agitprop’ project
initiated by the Soviets and their ANC/SACP allies to stigmatise white South Africans by
associating them with genuine crimes against humanity - which have generally included
totalitarian repression and the slaughter of millions of people.

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By contrast, some 23 000 people died in South Africa’s political violence between 1960 and
1994 - of whom fewer than 5 000 were killed by the security forces. Most of the rest of the
deaths occurred in the conflict between the IFP and the ANC. In Kenya, the British interned
more than 320 000 people during the Mau-Mau uprising and hanged more than a thousand
Mau-Mau members. In Algeria, the French killed more than 140 000 people in a war that
claimed some 700 000 lives.
None of this is meant to whitewash the injustices that were undoubtedly committed under
apartheid. However, we need a balanced understanding of the past - not one based on a
simplistic black/white, good/evil framework - but on a framework that reflects the infinite
shades of grey that actually characterise history.
John Allen, a close associate of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, acknowledges in his book “Rabble
Rouser for Peace” that “no evidence was ever forthcoming (at the TRC) implicating De Klerk
in violence.” This was despite the fact that Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) clearly
had an agenda to incriminate De Klerk. He writes of the TRC’s “frustration” at its failure to
“pin responsibility for violations of human rights on De Klerk” and acknowledges “the
embarrassing weakness of its finding against him.”
As for Boipatong, the TRC’s amnesty committee found in November 2000 that the IFP
supporters who perpetrated the Boipatong killings in June 1992 had acted alone.
It is ironic that Julius Malema who launched the vitriolic attack on De Klerk, threatened to
commit a real crime against humanity when he said on 7 November 2016 that “We are not
calling for the slaughtering of white people - at least not now.”
In a way, an attack by Julius Malema and the EFF, is the sincerest form of compliment. We
have seen his kind before: those who wear colour-coded uniforms; who use bully boy tactics
to disrupt democratic processes; who whip up race hatred and call their leaders “Führer, or
Duce, or Commander in Chief”. The words of a WB Yeats, (whom Malema would not doubt
regard as a ‘colonialist’), came to mind while watching the EFF debacle in Parliament:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Issued by the FW de Klerk Foundation
14 February 2020