OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Tuesday 7.20pm.
A SWISS economist named three German banks, Deutsche, Dresdner and Commerzbank, and three Swiss banks, Credit Suisse, Union Bank of Switzerland and Swiss Bank Corporation, on Tuesday as “apartheid’s major creditor banks”.
The claims come in a report issued by economist Mascha Madoerin and co-author, Gottfried Wellmer, for the Jubilee 2000 group working to repeal apartheid debt.
The Swiss Parliament will discuss on Wednesday whether to set up a “Truth Commission” to investigate Swiss banks’ support for the apartheid regime.
In the same category as the Swiss and German banks, Madoerin said, are British banks Barclays, NatWest and Standard Chartered; United States banks Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover and Morgan Guaranty; and French banks Banque Indo-Suez and Credit Lyonnais.
Also on Tuesday, Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane launched a campaign in Cape Town to pressurise international financial institutions that Jubilee 2000 claim helped bankroll the apartheid regime to make reparations.
According to the report South Africa’s foreign debt had by 1993 grown to R86,7-billion. Of that amount it owed Switzerland R7,9-billion and Germany R10,5-billion on its long term public debt.
Madoerin told a press conference that the apartheid government had used foreign credits “as an opportunity to postpone negotiations [with black liberation groups] and to intensify its repression and war”.
Ndungane, patron of Jubilee 2000, said targetting “international financial institutions which colluded under apartheid,” was a priority. “We want these companies to make reparations through a massive capital injection plan, some form of Marshall Plan, that will go towards education and job creation,” he said.
Ndungane’s campaign is backed by Swiss and German non-governmental organisations and follows the release in Geneva this month of Madoerin and Wellmer’s independent report. — AFP