S Africa's De Klerk stable but on ventilator

CAPE TOWN, June 9 (Reuters) F W de Klerk, the last president of white-ruled South Africa, was in stable condition today after suffering respiratory problems following an operation for colon cancer, a hospital official said.

De Klerk, a longtime smoker before reportedly quitting last year, shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela in 1993 for his efforts to end apartheid and establish a multi-racial democracy.

''His lungs are better and we are starting to wean him off the ventilator,'' Melissa Rademan, spokeswoman for Panorama Medi-Clinic, a private hospital in the suburbs of Cape Town, where De Klerk was admitted, told Reuters.

Doctors removed a malignant colon tumour from De Klerk, 70, last Saturday. Yesterday he underwent a second operation which detected no abnormalities but led to respiratory problems that required him to be placed on a ventilator.

De Klerk remained under sedation in the intensive care unit today. A spokesman for the former president said he would be sedated for three days, but Rademan said the timetable would depend upon how he reacted to being weaned off ventilation.

Media reports that De Klerk had received a round of chemotherapy were not correct, Rademan said. ''He is not well enough for that yet,'' she said.

After ousting apartheid hardliner P W Botha in a 1989 cabinet coup, De Klerk stunned the world months later with a sweeping repudiation of the policies of racial segregation that had been the backbone of Afrikaner rule since 1948, when his National Party took power.

He lifted a 30-year-old ban on Mandela's African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party and their armed wings and freed Mandela from prison, paving the way for a peaceful transition to non-racial democracy.

Mandela won the presidency in 1994 in the country's first multi-racial elections. De Klerk's National Party shared power in a ''Government of National Unity'' in which he served as a deputy president.

But the relationship between De Klerk and the austere Mandela was often strained.

De Klerk pulled his party out of the government in 1996 and retired from active politics in 1997. He later apologised for the miseries of apartheid before Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

While feted by the international community, De Klerk was ultimately scorned by many blacks outraged by his failure to curb political violence as well as by right-wing Afrikaners who viewed him as a traitor to the cause of white supremacy.

REUTERS SHR KN1718