Mandela-De Klerk Rift Imperils Unity : South Africa: White former president threatens to leave coalition government after being ‘viciously insulted.’

KEMPTON PARK, South Africa —  Although they shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize for jointly steering South Africa from apartheid to democracy, Nelson Mandela and Frederik W. de Klerk have always been adversaries, not friends.

But rarely before has their bickering been so public, or so serious.

Charging that he was “viciously insulted” during a contentious Cabinet meeting chaired by President Mandela on Wednesday, De Klerk used his opening address to the National Party convention here Thursday to say that cooperation is now impossible and that he had threatened to resign as deputy president.

“The National Party in general and I in particular, as its leader, were viciously insulted,” complained De Klerk, who headed the last white government. “The attack was unfair, unjustified and totally unacceptable.”

He said he was “obliged to inform the Cabinet that I would have to reconsider my position” in the coalition government formed after the country’s first free elections last April.

Rumors that De Klerk may quit, or withdraw his party from the government, sparked a sharp selloff in financial markets.

De Klerk said he will seek an urgent meeting with Mandela to resolve the worst rift between the two major parties in government since the election.

“What has happened is . . . of such a serious nature that it has created a crisis of confidence that makes cooperation impossible unless adequate remedial steps are taken,” De Klerk told about 1,200 delegates gathered at the World Trade Center here.

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Mandela, who spent the morning touring schools, declined to respond to questions about De Klerk or about tensions in the Cabinet.

The political row erupted as an outgrowth of a separate controversy over an allegedly secret attempt to grant amnesty for political crimes in the waning days of the apartheid regime led by De Klerk.

It began last week when Mandela’s justice minister, Dullah Omar, announced that he had just learned that former Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok, former Defense Minister Magnus Malan, outgoing Police Commissioner Johan van der Merwe and about 3,500 members of the apartheid-era police and security forces had been granted immunity from prosecution shortly before the election.

After a week of conflicting reports and political turmoil over the legal status of the amnesty, Mandela’s Cabinet ruled Wednesday that the immunities were invalid because the cases were not properly handled.

The Cabinet, however, said a widespread amnesty publicly granted in April, 1991, to thousands of members of the African National Congress and other black liberation groups will remain in force.

The Parliament is expected to approve a proposed Truth and Reconciliation Commission next month. Although details are still being worked out, the panel is expected to have authority to grant broad amnesty to those who confess to political crimes committed before December, 1993, including police.

The dispute gave De Klerk powerful verbal ammunition for his followers at the first National Party convention since the election. Indeed, it helped him achieve two of the party’s goals: raising its public profile and rallying the faithful after months of being overshadowed by Mandela and the African National Congress.

The row also intensified internal pressure for the party to recast and revitalize itself as a parliamentary opposition party outside the government, rather than continue to function as a much-ignored junior partner in a coalition.