South Africans had good reason to join in the celebrations remembering the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago because that event accelerated the demise of apartheid, says Max du Preez.
FW de Klerk was sworn in as South Africa’s president 50 days before the Wall tumbled.
He had inherited a country under siege of internal turmoil, external isolation, sanctions and boycotts.
He knew that the only way to escape a looming low-intensity civil war and utter economic destruction was to negotiate a settlement with the real leaders of the black majority.
But he had to deal with his party’s (and his own) decades-long propaganda – that the nasty international communists had made apartheid necessary, because the liberation movement was doing Moscow’s dirty work and thus had to be kept out of power at all costs.
We’re not fighting black people, young white conscripts fighting in neighbouring states were told, we’re fighting communist imperialism and forces of the anti-Christ.
Talking to these communist terrorists was tantamount to treason, was the official line of the Afrikaner establishment – as those of us found out after our return from a meeting with the ANC leadership in Dakar in 1987.
But De Klerk and many of his fellow cabinet ministers knew full well, as did their intelligence services, that there was never even a remote chance of the Soviet Union establishing a satellite state in southern Africa.
Nelson Mandela had convinced President PW Botha’s men during secret meetings in jail back in 1988 that he wasn’t a communist lackey and that the ANC wasn’t a communist plot.
The fall of the Berlin Wall gave De Klerk his way out. This was the end of international communism; the ANC was no longer a Moscow proxy, he could tell his people and especially the men of the old Defence Force – men who needed a communist enemy or face the boring prospect of peace.
Less than two months after the Wall fell, De Klerk announced the lifting of the ban on liberation movements and the release of Mandela.
It is often said that De Klerk had no choice; that he deserves no recognition for negotiating with the ANC and ending white rule. And yet other leaders in recent times who were faced with similar choices did not choose a negotiated settlement, but clung to power and brought great suffering to their people. Men like Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.
Like these men, De Klerk was surrounded by nationalists and military men dead set against making peace with the enemy.
I think De Klerk deserves a special place in history, not just because he made the right choice, but because he spent many months crisscrossing the country to sell his idea. He argued with and cajoled everybody from the securocrats, the Broederbond, Afrikaans churches, business people and cultural organisations.
Then De Klerk put his political career and legacy on the line and called a referendum of white people in March 1992.
The ANC condemned that racially exclusive plebiscite, but privately agreed that it would be in the interests of a peaceful and orderly transition to get the ruling minority to formally give the go-ahead for talks. The result was a great victory to him: 69 percent of 1.9 million white people agreed that negotiations were the way forward.
If the Berlin Wall hadn’t been removed on November 9, 1989, a settlement would probably have taken a lot longer and cost many more lives.
The Berlin Wall also cured me from any desire to become a communist. I was an ardent supporter of the United Democratic Front formed in 1983.
Many of my political friends were members of the SACP. I was impressed with their commitment and philosophical understanding of South Africa and the world’s problems. I found the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels enticing, so I went to live in East Berlin for a few months to experience a proper communist, socialist state.
That ugly, forbidding Wall got to me, as did the lack of freedom of speech and association and the routine jailing of dissidents. I never heard any convincing argument why a Utopian state needed a wall to keep its citizens in and shot those who tried to escape.
I came home, convinced that communism – and pure socialism, for that matter – inevitably meant a loss of freedom and an authoritarian state.
Pure capitalism, which I saw flourishing on the other side of the Wall in West Berlin, offered more freedom to some but inevitably meant exploitation of those without power. I have been a social democrat ever since.
* Max du Preez is an author and columnist.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.