ZURICH, June 23: German banks Dresdner and Deutsche and US computer firm IBM are the next targets of lawsuits seeking huge sums in reparations for victims of South Africa’s apartheid regime, a lawyer for the case said on Sunday.
The family of slain black activist Steve Biko would be the lead plaintiffs in the latest case, South African attorney Gugulethu Madlanga told Reuters in Johannesburg.
“We have instruction from the Biko family to pursue their claim against the banks,” he said.
Among the defendants in the latest case, Madlanga said lawyers would be taking on Dresdner Bank — the banking unit of German insurer Allianz AG — Deutsche Bank and International Business Machines (IBM). He also said they were considering bringing an action against Ford Motor Company.
“The (second) case against the banks and IBM will be brought probably some time next week,” Madlanga said.
Such action would widen the net that controversial US attorney Ed Fagan cast via a US lawsuit filed last week on behalf of four apartheid victims against three big banks in Switzerland and the United States.
That suit seeks up to $50 billion in damages from Swiss banks Credit Suisse Group and UBS AG and US-based Citigroup Inc.
The sweeping lawsuit alleges the banking companies helped finance the violent apartheid regime and made billions in desperately needed loans to further the politically isolated and cash-strapped government’s crimes against humanity.
The apartheid system of white minority rule ran South Africa from 1948-94.
THOUSANDS OF CALLS: Earlier Norbert Gschwend, Fagan’s assistant in Switzerland, confirmed a report in the SonntagsBlick Sunday paper quoting the lawyer as saying US computer makers, German banks and a Swiss weapons company were the next ones to get hit with suits.
Madlanga said more than 1,000 South Africans had called a hotline set up to help other people join the apartheid suit that has already been filed against the three banks.
“We are just assessing them. We will be interviewing them next week,” he said, adding that many of the callers were people who had taken their cases to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which aimed to seek redress for wrongs done under apartheid.
Biko, the leader of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement and subject of the book and smash-hit movie Cry, Freedom!, was killed by security forces in 1977 at the age of 31. He was an iconic figure in the resistance to apartheid and was seeking to unite student protest movements when he died after being tortured in police custody.
Many would put Biko second only to Nelson Mandela in the pantheon of anti-apartheid heroes.
Last week’s lawsuit seeks class-action status on behalf of other victims of human rights violations under apartheid, a government policy of racial discrimination against black Africans who were denied basic rights and beaten, jailed or killed when they protested unjust laws.
Two of the plaintiffs said they were tortured and two are surviving parents of children who were killed in South Africa.
The suit alleges the banks conspired to fund technology and equipment that Pretoria used to commit crimes against humanity from 1948 to 1993. Apartheid officially ended with democratic elections in 1994 won by Mandela’s African National Congress.
Swiss bankers always said at the time that they disapproved of apartheid but that Swiss neutrality and Berne’s refusal to join international economic sanctions against South Africa prevented them from taking unilateral measures.
SWISS REJECT LAWSUITS: Swiss banks have dismissed Fagan’s claims as “preposterous”. The government said the suit was just “another unjust attack against Switzerland”. And Swiss papers ridiculed Fagan, whose brash style has made him few friends in Switzerland.
The 49-year-old Texas-born personal injury lawyer shot to fame in the 1990s when he helped force Swiss banks into a $1.25 billion settlement for Holocaust victims who lost their savings.
Fagan is using a US law that lets non-US citizens file human rights suits against firms operating in the United States. —Reuters
