The South African government has refused to support a lawsuit against foreign multinationals and banks which allegedly propped up apartheid because it fears deterring investors.
Two separate legal actions lodged in New York have accused dozens of European, American and Asian corporations of collaborating in the murder, torture and forced labour of black South Africans during the apartheid regime.
In the first official response to the lawsuits, two cabinet ministers said this week that the government would not back the claims because they would harm attempts to woo foreign investment.
The lawsuits have prompted bitter debate, with victims claiming they have been abandoned and critics saying South Africa had made a collective decision to consign apartheid to history rather than turn it into a bonanza for ”ambulance-chasing” lawyers.
The justice minister, Penuell Maduna, told Business Day that the cabinet had adopted a policy of ”indifference” to the lawsuits, which the companies and banks promised to fight.
”We are not supporting the claims for individual reparations. We are talking to those very same companies named in the lawsuits about investing in post-apartheid South Africa. The focus is on getting those companies to keep investing in South Africa to benefit the entire population as a whole,” said Maduna.
The finance minister, Trevor Manuel, was blunter, saying the country did not need the suits. He spoke after a visit last week by a US trade delegation, led by the commerce secretary, Donald Evans, which publicly said that US companies might be discouraged from investing.
President Thabo Mbeki’s economic policy has staked job creation and poverty alleviation on foreign investment. Despite IMF praise, the results have been disappointing.
The apartheid regime’s last president, FW de Klerk, stoked controversy by urging the multinationals to fight the action, which he called unjustified because foreign investment accelerated apartheid’s demise by increasing wealth. ”It wasn’t sanctions or the withdrawal of international companies that ended apartheid but rather the economic growth of the 1960s and 70s,” he told a Swiss magazine.
Some have accused the victims’ group of undermining the spirit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was meant to air grievances and let the country move on.
But the victims’ group claims that the democratically elected government which took over in 1994 has failed to honour promises of compensation.
The Khulumani support group and Jubilee South Africa lodged a lawsuit earlier this month ”on behalf of victims of state-sanctioned torture, murder, rape, arbitrary detention and inhumane treatment”.
Filed in a federal court in Brooklyn on behalf of the group’s 33 000 members and 85 individuals, the suit named the Swiss banks Credit Suisse and UBS, Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank of Germany, Barclays Bank of the UK, and Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase of the US.
The oil companies Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, Caltex and BP were named, as were car makers DaimlerChrysler, Ford and General Motors, the computer giant IBM, the electronics companies ICL and Fujitsu, and the mining group Rio Tinto.
The companies allegedly ignored UN appeals to shun Pretoria while it was a racist regime and sustained it with loans, goods and markets.
IBM, for example, allegedly supplied the computers which tracked apartheid’s opponents and some car makers sold the armoured vehicles from which police shot unarmed protesters. The firms have rejected the suit as without merit, spurious and preposterous.
Khulumani has not named a figure but a similar lawsuit filed in June, a class action modelled on one which forced Swiss banks to pay $1,25-billion to Holocaust survivors, has cited a figure of $50-billion damages. The US lawyer who made his name in the Holocaust case, Edward Fagan, filed the apartheid action.
Among those bringing that case are Dorothy Molefi and her daughter Lulu Petersen. Lulu and her brother Hector were immortalised in a photograph of the 1976 Soweto uprising. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001