By Jeremy Lovell
London - Former president FW de Klerk, the man who repealed apartheid, is setting out with a formidable group of senior statesmen and women to try to cure the world's problems.
The Global Leadership Foundation (GLF), which will be quietly launched at a meeting in southern England on Saturday, is a diplomatic think-tank whose objective is to help troubled emerging democracies achieve stability and growth.
"Our aim is to support democratisation, to support leaders by helping them through confidential and quiet advice, to adopt well-balanced economic policies to help defuse threatening conflicts," the Nobel laureate said in London.
The initial list of people who will offer their experience includes former Czech president Vaclav Havel, Botswana's Ketumile Masire and Portugal's Annibal Cavaco Silva.
Its patrons, who have lent their names but not their participation to the non-profit organisation, are Nelson Mandela, George Bush senior, Lech Walesa, former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo and Helmut Schmidt.
"We will be issue-driven," de Klerk said. "We will be focusing on a particular issue in a particular country where, if the right decision is taken, it will open the door to solutions.
The man who freed Mandela from jail in 1990 and four years later saw his former prisoner elected president in the country's first democratic elections, said the GLF was a logical extension of his own FW de Klerk Foundation which is primarily focused on South Africa.
By contrast with the likes of Jimmy Carter and George Soros who go into countries with considerable fanfare, the GLF will work quietly behind elected national leaders to help them solve their problems.
De Klerk said the GLF's small secretariat, led by former British diplomat John Shepherd, had already drawn up a list of 10 potential target countries but declined to say which, other than that Zimbabwe was not among them.
"Zimbabwe is an example where we won't get involved. We won't advise dictators who are only interested in continuing to be dictators. We won't advise megalomaniacs and strengthen their hands to be successful megalomaniacs," he said.
"We will advise, irrespective of their political history, leaders who are committed to do the right things, who really want to democratise, who really want to move towards balanced economic policies," he added.
The 68-year-old de Klerk said the current membership of the organisation had between them more than a century of experience in governments across the globe and an average age of 67, and aimed to increase representation from Latin America and Asia.
Initially with an operating budget of donated funds of around £2,5-million a year, the plan is to become self-financing within three years through fees to be paid by the client countries.
"We put an extremely high premium on our independence. Nobody should ever be able to point a finger and say that this organisation has a political agenda," de Klerk said.
"Our unique selling point lies firstly in the confidentiality of our method, secondly in the sharp focus on issues and thirdly in the variety of experience which we hope to bring into every ad hoc team which we put together when we engage with a country," he added.