![]() ![]() Of the three, Tutu had been the first to earn his Nobel Prize in 1984, for openly supporting the protest movement that was taking to the streets against the apartheid regime in South Africa’s cities, offering the African National Congress in exile an inside line and drawing the attention of Western public opinion to the failure of the white government’s reforms. Nor had his image benefited from the shift of the fight against racism from a political-diplomatic tool (apartheid was declared a ‘crime against humanity’ by the UN General Assembly with the decisive vote of pro-Soviet communist countries and authoritarian regimes) to a universal and non-negotiable principle, one of the few truly indisputed and indisputable in the post-bipolar world. Unlike Mandela and Tutu, De Klerk paid a high price for the fading of the memory of the historical role played by the ‘reformists’ in the peaceful ‘pact’ transitions at the end of the Cold War, when dialogue between opposing sides and radically alternative values seemed the only way out of the nightmare of an armed clash. De Klerk, the last white president of South Africa who received the award along with Mandela in 1993, had passed away almost unnoticed, except for the minimal (and almost embarrassed) coverage by the anglosphere’s media. ![]() A few weeks before Tutu’s departure, Frederik W. In 2013, the death of Nelson Mandela hit the global headlines for weeks and his life and times were celebrated with a stadium event to which an unprecedented number of world leaders participated. With the passing of Desmond Tutu, who died in Cape Town at age 90 on December 26, even the last of the three Nobel Peace prize winners linked to the end of apartheid in the 1990s has gone.
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