April 16, 2002

Contact: Fallon Farokhi, Student Union Activities, (785) 917-1226.

Nobel Prize winner F.W. de Klerk to speak at KU on Saturday

Editor's note: De Klerk will be available for brief interviews about 15 minutes before his lecture. Contact Fallon Farokhi for details.

LAWRENCE -- Former South African President F.W. de Klerk, who received a Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela in 1993, will speak at the University of Kansas campus later this week.

De Klerk will deliver the lecture "The Challenge of Change" at 7 p.m. Saturday, April 20, at the Lied Center.

Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are available at Student Union Activities, Liberty Hall and Murphy Hall box offices. Admission is $5, but KU ID holders pay $2 per ticket.

SUA and Student Senate are sponsoring the event, which is part of the 2002 Student Lecture Series.

As South Africa's first "television president," de Klerk developed a friendlier, more open and accessible relationship with the media than his predecessors. He was praised widely for his efforts to keep South Africa on the negotiation path as it moved toward a nonracial democracy and for the grace he displayed during the transition.

In 1990, de Klerk made several announcements that accelerated the elimination of apartheid. He announced that Nelson Mandela would be released from prison, and de Klerk lifted the ban on many organizations, including the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party.

In addition to the Nobel Prize he won with Mandela for the leading role he played in the democratization of South Africa, de Klerk has received many other honors and honorary degrees around the world, including Time magazine's 1993 Man of the Year. He shared that recognition with Mandela, Yitzak Rabin and Yasser Arafat.

De Klerk also introduced a set of initiatives that led directly to South Africa's first universal-franchise election in April 1994.

On May 10, 1994, de Klerk was sworn into office as one of two executive deputy presidents in South Africa's new Government of National Unity under President Nelson Mandela. The inauguration was the culmination of the process of negotiation and reconciliation that ended the apartheid era and transformed South Africa into a nonracial democracy, a process in which de Klerk has played a major part. He resigned from his office as deputy president in 1996, a move that was hailed as a step toward normalizing multiparty politics.

In June 1999, he established the F.W. de Klerk Foundation to continue the success and stability of the new multicultural South African democracy. The foundation will address recurring tensions and nurture relations between diverse South African communities by popularizing and monitoring adherence to their constitution and bill of rights of 1996.

He published his autobiography, "The Last Trek -- a New Beginning," in 1998. The book was released in the United States in 1999.

For more information call the SUA office at (785) 864-SHOW.