January 05, 2012

Ask a man who knows: De Klerk answers Goldstone

I was sent this BBC Radio 4 programme recently. It actually went out on 29 December 2011. It has De Klerk, the last white president of South Africa, explaining why apartheid had no future, not in South Africa anyway.

What I supported as a younger politician was exactly what the whole world now supports for Israel and Palestine, namely separate nation states will be the solution. In our case we failed. There were three main reasons. We failed because the whites wanted too much land for themselves. We failed because the majority of blacks said this is not how we want our political rights. And we failed because we became economically totally integrated. We became an economic omelet and you can never again divide an omelet into the white and the yellow of the egg. And we realized in the early eighties we had landed in a place which has become morally unjustified.

Goldstone denied the apartheid analogy here.

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