By Jeremy Lovell
London - South Africa's Nobel Prize-winning former president announced on Tuesday he is taking his group of 22 former world leaders on a new offensive to solve global problems without waiting to be asked.
The Global Leadership Foundation (GLF), which groups 22 senior statesmen and women sharing more than a century of world leadership experience, will give unsolicited advice to developing world governments, founder FW de Klerk said.
"We have decided to broaden our scope to add on to our original objectives some new ways of making a contribution towards peace, democratisation and a better world," the man who repealed apartheid told Reuters in London.
"We will enter the field of mediation and, in addition to our original focus of just advising governments on governance issues, we will be acting pro-actively in identifying some neglected conflicts and problems of the world," he added.
Up to now, the GLF has only become involved when invited to do so by governments or institutions.
Members include former presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers such as Fidel Ramos of the Philippines, Michel Rocard of France, Mike Moore of New Zealand, Ketumile Masire of Botswana and Jose Maria Aznar of Spain.
Honorary patrons include Nelson Mandela - the man de Klerk freed from jail in 1990 who went on to succeed him - and former US President George Bush.
Formally established by Nobel laureate de Klerk in March 2004, the group of diplomatic top guns is already involved in two projects in Africa and one in Eastern Europe, and is about to embark on another in Africa and one in the Americas.
De Klerk, 70 and recovering from cancer, declined to name the projects or identify the countries involved.
"We are not the rescuing knights on white horses who ride in in the full glare of television cameras and announce they are there to help," he said. "Our niche is confidentiality and working quietly behind the scenes."
To date it has raised more than £2,5-million (about R34,4-million) from 50 rich individuals and multi-national companies - but no big individual sums and no money from governments.
De Klerk said that with its new expanded remit it was even possible the GLF might become involved in Zimbabwe. But he ruled out any involvement in the war-torn Darfur province of Sudan simply because world attention was already focused there.
"In the next month or so we will pick out where there is a problem within a country or between two countries and we will bring together a group ... to see if there is an action plan which can be developed," he said at GLF headquarters in London.
The GLF believes its optimum workload would be five projects a year to make full use of the vast array of experience it can field without overloading it. De Klerk said the war in Iraq had, if anything, increased the need for the GLF's services.
"The Iraq war has resulted in (other) countries needing help dropping down the international agenda," he said.