Lawsuit Targets Apartheid-Era Cos.
By RAVI NESSMAN
Associated Press Writer
June 17, 2002, 5:21 PM EDT
SOWETO, South Africa -- Standing at the site where apartheid police killed
her brother decades ago, Lulu Petersen said Monday she hoped a class-action
lawsuit against foreign companies that dealt with the racist, white regime
would finally bring her family justice.
"It's been too long," said Petersen, whose 12-year-old brother, Hector, was
killed during the Soweto uprising 26 years ago. "We want reparations from
those international companies and banks that profited from the blood and
misery of our fathers and mothers and our brothers and sisters."
The Petersen family was one of four plaintiffs suing Citigroup, the largest
financial institution in the United States, and Swiss banking giants UBS and
Credit Suisse.
Lawyers for the victims hoped hundreds of thousands of people would join the
lawsuit, which is seeking billions of dollars in reparations and will be
filed Tuesday in New York, lawyer Bruce Nagel said.
Credit Suisse spokeswoman Karin Rhomberg said the bank saw no grounds for
the lawsuit and said the company should not be held responsible for
apartheid's crimes. UBS spokesman Michael Willi declined to comment Sunday.
A call to Citigroup was not immediately returned.
The lawsuit was announced Monday at a news conference at the Hector Petersen
memorial in Soweto.
Petersen was killed after police began firing tear gas and live bullets at
thousands of protesting students. A photograph of a man running with the
dying boy in his arms became an international symbol of apartheid's
injustices.
The lawsuit was being filed by Ed Fagan, an American attorney who
represented Holocaust victims and their heirs in a lawsuit that forced Swiss
banks into a $1.25 billion settlement in 1998.
At a separate news conference Monday in Zurich, Switzerland, Fagan was
heckled by about 50 protesters -- angry at his role in the Holocaust
lawsuit -- as he tried to speak outdoors.
"The day of reckoning has arrived," Fagan later told reporters after moving
the news conference to a local hotel. "This is only the beginning," he said,
adding that lawsuits were planned against other Swiss and U.S. firms and
companies in France, Britain and Germany.
Apartheid was an oppressive web of racist laws starting in 1948 that
classified all South Africans by race and stripped even the most basic
rights from those who were not white.
As efforts to overthrow the white regime grew, authorities began jailing
some opponents, killing others without trial and chasing still others from
their homes. The regime ended in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela as
president in the nation's first all-race elections.
The lawyers said the three targeted companies helped prop up the white
government, which was struggling as foreign capital fled the country, with
loans and other business deals worth billions of dollars. The help came even
after the United Nations asked all member states to break off diplomatic,
trade and transport relations with South Africa in 1962.
"Were it not for the conspiracy of these financial institutions and
companies, apartheid would not have been kept alive," the lawsuit said.
"Were it not for the conspiracy of these financial institutions and
companies, men, women, children and families would not have suffered from
forced removals, forced labor, imprisonment, banishment, kidnapping,
torture, disfigurement, murders, massacres, psychological trauma and
terror."
The lawyers declined to say how much they were seeking in damages, but said
they expected billions of dollars. That money would not be distributed to
individuals, but used collectively to help alleviate the impact of apartheid
by building schools or houses, for example, said Diane Sammons, a U.S.
lawyer working on the case.
"When everybody else was divesting, the Swiss banks took up the cause and
added much more money," she said. "They continued to profit from these
crimes against humanity, torture, murder."
Copyright © 2002, The Associated Press
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