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Cape Town — On the eve of his 80th birthday this week, the last apartheid president FW de Klerk says his hands are clean.
“The TRC [Truth and Ceconciliation commission] tried its level best to peg serious miscarriages of justice and gross violations of human rights on me,” he told the Cape Town Press Club at a lunch yesterday.
But there was no factual basis for this and it couldn’t find him guilty, he said.
De Klerk was adamant that he was never part of any policy or planning which said people could be “assassinated, raped or tortured”.
“It was not the policy of the day.”
He said the TRC did good work in uncovering the truth about many aspects of the apartheid era, but was unbalanced.
“They’ve not investigated the 400-plus senior IFP people who were assassinated in cold blood. There is nothing in their reports. They haven’t uncovered the truth of necklace murders and black-on-black killings.”
He strongly supported the idea of the TRC, but felt it did not succeed in promoting reconciliation.
The greatest flaw for him was that it was not representative and there were no commissioners who could speak for the National Party and IFP.
“Reconciliation cannot occur if there is no consensus and consensus is not possible if all sides are not properly represented.” — News24
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