ZGram - 6/16/2002 - "When will the Palestinians hire Ed Fagan?"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

June 16, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Let me make a prediction:  This one isn't going to run as smoothly as 
the Holocaust extortion scheme inflicted on the Swiss and on the 
Germans!

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Apartheid victims sue Western banks and firms for billions

Lawyer who championed those who suffered in the Holocaust fights for 
South Africa's oppressed

Terry Bell in Johannesburg
Sunday June 16, 2002
The Observer

The American lawyer who won compensation for Holocaust victims is 
about to launch legal claims for billions of pounds against 
companies, many of them British, that benefited from apartheid.

The first action will be announced at a press conference tomorrow by 
Dorothy Molefi, mother of the most famous casualty of the 1976 Soweto 
student uprising, Hector Petersen, who at the age of 13 was the first 
student shot dead by police in 1976. The photograph of his 
bloodstained body cradled in the arms of a friend, with his tearful 
sister running alongside, came to be the symbol of student resistance.

Molefi arrived in Switzerland yesterday - the anniversary of the 
uprising - accompanied by her South African lawyer, John Ngcebetsha. 
She and other claimants will be represented by Ed Fagan, who won 
class-action victories on behalf of Holocaust victims.

First claims are against Swiss and German banks that continued to 
lend money to the apartheid regime after 1985 when other 
international lending institutions had decided to pull back.

Also in the firing line are British and American companies that 
invested in, and continued to profit from, the apartheid system. Some 
of the biggest names in international business have been targeted.

Computer giants IBM and ICL, oil companies Royal Dutch Shell, BP and 
Mobil, armaments manufacturer Vickers and Rolls-Royce were all 
involved in supplying equipment, investment and technology to a 
regime pursuing a policy deemed to be a crime against humanity.

Because of the international nature of business, Fagan's actions in 
the New York courts could have implications even for British 
companies such as BTR, which has the dubious distinction of having 
been the focus of South Africa's longest strike.

The essence of Fagan's cases is that the apartheid system was akin to 
that in Nazi Germany. He points out that the first Prime Minister 
under apartheid, Daniel Malan, supported the Axis powers in the 
Second World War.

One of his successors, Hendrik Verwoerd, Prime Minister from 1958 to 
1966, described as 'the architect of apartheid', had been found by 
the Johannesburg supreme court to be a Nazi sympathiser.

In 1943, Mr Justice Millin found that Verwoerd, an academic turned 
editor of Die Transvaler newspaper, 'did support Nazi propaganda, he 
did make his paper a tool of the Nazis in South Africa, and he knew 
it'.

According to Fagan, the regime that came into being on Africa's 
southern tip in 1948 was, therefore, linked ideologically with that 
of the then only recently defeated Nazi regime in Germany. Like that 
regime, it relied on money to lubricate the wheels and machinery of 
repression.

Quoting from the report of South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and 
Reconciliation Commission, Fagan said: 'Business was central to the 
economy that sustained the South African state during the apartheid 
years.'

Business, he argued, was therefore liable to pay reparations to the 
victims for propping up the system.

As a result of the Nuremberg trials after Second World War, 
'companies were put on notice', he said. They were told that they 
could be held accountable 'just as were the financial institutions 
and corporations that fuelled the Nazi regime' for acts that 
supported crimes against humanity.

'Incredible as it may seem, financial institutions and corporations 
or their agents - including many that had conspired with and made 
possible the Nazi regime's reign of terror - were willing, even 
anxious, to engage in the same type of business with apartheid South 
Africa,' he said.

South Africa may not have had extermination camps, but the regime 
terrorised for decades a majority of the population through mass 
forced removals, arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture and 
officially sanctioned murder. It also deliberately set out to 
cripple, intellectually and academically, the majority of the 
population in a grotesque experiment in social engineering.

Business often enjoyed an almost symbiotic relationship with the 
military that sat astride this system of terror and subjugation. 
Leading business figures even attended meetings with senior military 
officers to exchange information and plan the most efficient means of 
maintaining the apartheid system.

As a consequence the majority of South Africans suffered incalculable 
harm that would not have been possible, and certainly not to the 
extent that it occurred, without the finance, the expertise, the 
trade and the commerce of international banks and corporations and 
their agents.

No figures have yet been put on the final amounts that may be 
claimed, but the claims will be based on the profits that accrued to 
the various companies over the time they benefited from the apartheid 
system.

In more than 40 years when that system was in place, the revenues 
generated amounted to billions of pounds.

The court actions could also have some profound political 
implications. One of the initial class action claimants, along with 
Molefi is, for example, Sigqibo Mpendulo. A one-time anti-apartheid 
activist, Mpendulo was the father of twin 12-year-old boys, Samora 
and Sadat. They were gunned down by a death squad in their sleep in 
October 1993, together with three of their friends.

The boys died in a hail of automatic gunfire as they slept in front 
of the television set in the living room of the family home in the 
then nominally independent 'homeland' of Transkei. The man who 
authorised the death squad raid was President F.W. de Klerk who was, 
at the time, waiting to travel to Oslo to accept, jointly with Nelson 
Mandela, the 1993 Nobel peace prize.

Tomorrow, at the Hector Petersen memorial in Soweto, local lawyers 
and claimants will announce details of the local aspects of the 
cases. A national telephone call centre has been established through 
which more evidence will be gathered and more claimants added to a 
list which already includes some of the best-known names of 
anti-apartheid struggle.

(Source:  http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,738404,00.html

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