Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk won the Nobel Peace Prize Friday for working "to peacefully end apartheid" and push South Africa toward democracy.
"By looking ahead to South African reconciliation, instead of back at the deep wounds of the past, they have shown personal integrity and great political courage," the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in awarding the $825,000 prize.Committee chairman Francis Sejersted said he hoped the award would lead to less violence in South Africa, where daily bloodshed has taken thousands of lives. He acknowledged that some people may not consider de Klerk and Mandela men of peace.
"We know we are taking a risk," he said, after announcing that anti-apartheid activists had taken the prize for the third time since 1960.
"These two winners' political past has included attitudes that could be criticized, based on the criteria that we use to award the peace prize," he said. "But . . . these are not saints. They are politicians in a complicated reality and it is the total picture that was decisive . . . together with what they have achieved recently."
De Klerk, 57, descended from generations of white conservative Afrikaners, changed the course of history when he became president in August 1989. He immediately began dismantling the apartheid laws of race division and white privilege and offered the majority blacks a role in governing their country.
"White domination will have to disappear. Otherwise, there will never be peace in South Africa," de Klerk said during his first days in office.
Today, he said he accepted the award "with great humility" and predicted it would serve as an inspiration.
Mandela, leader of the African National Congress, emerged without bitterness from 27 "long, lonely, wasted years" in prison in 1990, saying his goal was the same as it had been when he launched the ANC guerrilla wing in 1960: "a democratic, nonracial South Africa."
Mandela, 75, said in London earlier this week that if he and de Klerk won the prize, "it would be an acknowledgment of the role of the government and the ANC to pull South Africa from apartheid to democracy."
The Johannesburg headquarters of the ANC erupted in cheering and dancing when party members saw the announcement on television.
Some ANC supporters, protesting outside a courthouse where two white men were just convicted of murdering ANC leader Chris Hani, objected to de Klerk's sharing the prize with Mandela.
But Desmond Tutu, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town who won the peace prize in 1984, said the joint award was appropriate.
`I hope that it will work to weld us together as a people, to say that here are two leaders from two opposite ends of the racial and political spectrum who have tried to work together for the end of this vicious system, and that therefore, we, too, as a people should stand together," he told Norwegian radio.
De Klerk and Mandela clinched the prize when the government and the ANC agreed last month to create a multiracial council to govern the nation until the April 1994 elections, Sejersted said. The black majority will, for the first time, vote in a national election along with other races.
"From their different points of departure, Mandela and de Klerk have reached agreement on the principles for a transition to a new political order based on the tenet of `one man-one vote,"' the committee said in its citation.
In comments to Norwegian radio, de Klerk said the prize "will bring a message to all South Africans that the world will want us to succeed, to achieve lasting peace in South Africa."
"It will serve for us as an inspiration," he said.
In South Africa, ANC spokesman Carl Niehaus said: "It is recognition of the efforts Mr. Mandela has made throughout his life to work for peace and democracy in South Africa."
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Winners of the 1993 Nobel Prizes
- Peace: Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk, South Africa
- Literature: Toni Morrison, United States
- Medicine: Richard Roberts, Britain; Phillip Sharp, United States
- Physics: Russell Hulse, Joseph Taylor, United States
- Chemistry: Kary Mullis, United States; Michael Smith, Canada
- Economics: Robert Fogel, Douglass North, United States