We have slayed one monster, but we leave the other one very much intact.” “Apartheid was always about political oppression and economic exploitation. “Apartheid, like slavery before it, was always about profit,” Lapsley said. “De Klerk’s rule was one of the most violent periods of our history,” Lapsley said.Īs the chairman of the State Security Council, de Klerk was present at meetings where violence against anti-apartheid leaders was ordered, right up to the 1994 elections that brought to power Mandela and his party, the African National Congress, according to Lapsley and others who have studied minutes of the council’s meetings. There’s no accepting of responsibility for what happened under his watch.”Īn Anglican priest and anti-apartheid activist, Lapsley was hit by a parcel bomb that blew off his hands and blinded him in one eye in 1990, months after de Klerk freed Nelson Mandela and began negotiations that eventually dismantled apartheid.
“It’s good that he apologizes for the pain and hurt, but there’s no reckoning.
Michael Lapsley told The Associated Press.
“It’s the last of a series of half-baked apologies,” the Rev. Some South Africans were moved by de Klerk’s final appearance, but many were critical, saying he avoided acknowledging that apartheid was a crime against humanity in which he was complicit. “I, without qualification, apologize for the pain and the hurt and the indignity and the damage that apartheid has done to Black, brown and Indians in South Africa,“ said de Klerk, an apparition emaciated by mesothelioma cancer who nonetheless chose his words carefully. Stoking the furor is a video that he released posthumously in which he said he was sorry. The controversy following de Klerk to the grave comes 27 years after the official end of the brutal regime that oppressed the country’s Black majority for generations. de Klerk, who died last week at 85 and is to be buried Sunday. JOHANNESBURG (AP) - Liberator of Nelson Mandela? Or a leader responsible for racist murders? South Africa is engrossed in debate over the legacy of apartheid’s last president, F.W.