
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, October 16, 1993                   TAG: 9310160191
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: OSLO, NORWAY                                LENGTH: Medium

S. AFRICANS WIN PEACE PRIZE NOBEL PANEL AWARDS MANDELA, DE KLERK FOR THEIR

Even though South Africa is bloodied by violence, Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday because it was time to encourage a peaceful end to the world's ethnic conflicts.

The two laureates looked beyond "the deep wounds of the past" in their drive to peacefully end apartheid, the award committee said in announcing the $825,000 prize.

The decision drew mostly praise, although some condemned it for presenting the men as equals.

"Now I know that the world has gone mad," said Eugene TerreBlanche, leader of South Africa's neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement, which has vowed war against reforms.

Norwegian historian Tore Inne Eriksen called the award "grotesque" because "it makes a freedom fighter equal with the leader of a totalitarian regime."

But Britain's Prime Minister John Major, reflecting what appeared to be the broader view, said: "I am sure it will give further impetus to the search for a peaceful future for all the people of South Africa."

The Norwegian Nobel Committee saw it in much the same light.

"Mandela's and de Klerk's constructive policy of peace and reconciliation also points the way to the peaceful resolution of similar deep-rooted conflicts elsewhere in the world," the panel said.

De Klerk, 57, the descendant of white conservative Afrikaners, immediately began dismantling the apartheid laws of race division and white privilege when he became president in 1989. A year later, he freed Mandela, the 75-year-old leader of the African National Congress, from 27 years in prison.

The committee acknowledged the awkwardness of awarding the prize to men operating in a cauldron of violence.

Francis Sejersted, chairman of the Nobel Committee, said: "We were aware that these two winners' political past has included attitudes that could be criticized. . . . These are not saints. They are politicians in a complicated reality and it is the total picture that was decisive."

He acknowledged the situation in South Africa could worsen.

"We have no guarantees and that is the chance we will have to take, and we have taken," he said. "We have taken several chances in the past."

In 1990, the committee gave the prize to Mikhail Gorbachev for his reforms of the Soviet system. A few months later, the former Soviet president ordered a bloody military crackdown in the Baltics.

Still, Sejersted said, the committee felt Mandela and de Klerk needed support now because both face strong opposition.

"Whether they [the opposition] will succeed in stopping the process or return it to violence, we don't know. But the danger is there," Sejersted said.

"But we see it as completely clear that it is Mandela and de Klerk's line that gives promise of a future peaceful solution. There is really no alternative."

by CNB