Lawyers representing South African apartheid victims seeking billions of dollars for ”blood and misery” from German, Swiss and US firms will present their claims in New York on Friday.
Flamboyant US attorney Ed Fagan, backed by a team of international lawyers, is driving the class action lawsuit modelled on compensation claims by Holocaust survivors which netted $1,25-billion.
Figures of anywhere between $50-billion and $100-billion have been bandied about for the apartheid claims.
Friday’s hearing under Judge Richard Casey in the New York Southern District Court marks only the first stage in the legal process, with any trial still at least six months away.
One of the complainants, Sigqibo Mpendulo (63) said he had been ”looking for justice” since October 8, 1993.
That morning he came home to find his twin boys, 14, and their three young friends dead. They were killed in a hail of gunfire while watching television and the South African Defence Force claimed the next day to have killed five terrorists.
Mpendulo and thousands of other victims hope that Fagan will deliver long-awaited reparations.
Lawsuits were filed in Manhattan on June 19 against Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse and US bank Citibank and on July 3 against US computer giant IBM, and Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank and Commerzbank, all of Germany.
They are under fire for providing money, technology and training to prop up the apartheid state between 1948 and 1993 ? despite apartheid being declared a crime against humanity, and international embargoes.
Other companies to be targeted include oil, electronics, weapons and pharmaceutical firms.
Behind the scenes, divisions are widening between Fagan’s team and another alliance representing victims which is charging that Fagan is steamrolling claims through and raising victims’ expectations of large payouts.
The five plaintiffs, expected to rise in number, were initially named on June 16 and include Dorothy Molefi, the mother of apartheid’s best known victim, Hector Petersen.
Police shot dead her 13-year-old son in Soweto on June 16, 1976, triggering an uprising against apartheid rule.
”We want reparations from those international companies and banks that profited from the blood and misery of our fathers and mothers, our brothers and sisters,” she declared at the start of the process.
The other claimants are Mpendulo, Nyameka Goniwe (whose husband was murdered by a hit squad), Lungisile Ntsebeza (detained, tortured and banished) and Themba Makubela (banished). Their number is expected to soar, following more than 2 000 calls to a hotline set up in mid-June.
The judge is likely to establish a timetable to avoid an open-ended process, said John Ngcebetsha, a South African lawyer working with Fagan.
”There may be a motion to preserve evidence, to order the defendants not to destroy evidence in their archives,” he added.
”The relief we seek is twofold. A limited number of victims whose violations were so gross that they warrant direct payment. For general violations we would like to create a humanitarian fund to redress the inequities of apartheid.”
Ngcebetsha said their Apartheid Claims Taskforce (ACT) was concentrating on the lawsuit and downplayed the concerns about Fagan’s ”cowboy tactics” raised by the Apartheid Debt and Reparations Campaign (ADRC), which initially supported the claim.
Now ADRC, an umbrella group, has distanced itself from the lawsuit. ”We have no association with that litigation,” said their US-based lawyer Michael Hausfeld — who like Fagan has represented Holocaust survivors.
”We are looking at different categories of victims and identifying the aiders and abetters (of apartheid),” he said.
”We would like broad relief … this will not necessarily lead to class action suits. We are at the end stage of the research process and will know how to proceed in the next 60 to 90 days.”
Shirley Gunn, head of the Western Cape Khulumani Support Group for victims, said they felt Fagan’s rushed approach to apartheid claims had caused confusion.
”We have been inundated with ordinary people asking our opinion. People are desperate. It is not fair and we cannot support the process,” she said. – Sapa-AFP