Dear Comrade Vukoni,S Africa shuns apartheid lawsuits Country needs investment, say ministers, not compensation
How low we Africans have sunk.
We are being violated by our very 'own'.
I am still very troubled by the article you posted, in which South African
Justice minister, Penuell Maduna, and Finance minister, Trevor Manuel, get
the temerity to refer to those seeking justice as 'ambulance chasers'.
It is an unpardonable violation and insult to those 12 to 17 year old kids who,
with their bare hands, confronted apartheid on June 16th 1976, like nobody
before or sinse.
The kids had rejected the passive slave mentality of their parents and elders
and the arrogance and rape by settler colonists.
The most famous ( and haunting ) photograph of MBUYISA MAKHUBU
carrying the body of 12-year-old HECTOR PETERSON , who had been
shot, with Hector's sister ANTOINETTE SITHOLE, running next to him
is seared in our individual and collective consiousness.
It was a most powerful image of Apartheid South Africa that roused humanity
into revulsion. June 16th 1976 was the day the tide turned against settler
colonialism.
Is there a sane African ( or South African ) that can claim that
there were ambulances for the more than 200 Black kids that were
gunned down that day?
see photo:-
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/africa/06/15/inside.africa/
Below is another photo, of Mandela milking political capital out of
the kids that fell.
These kids later formed their vanguard organizations AZAPO [ Azania
Peoples' Organization ] and BCM [ Black Consiousnes Movement ].
This is a generation that was never ( up to today ) been ANC.
The ANC has stolen history right left and center.
They claim Sharpville ( 1960 ) which was the day the PAC burnt the passes,
(the Book of 'Life') as they used to call these passes. ANC has renamed it
Human rights day.
It reads on the side:- "the engraving on the right side of the monument
is of a man carrying a dead child and is taken from a famous photograph
found on posters honoring the ANC children's movement of the 1976 uprising".
"ANC children uprising"? my God.
Mandela and the ANC are the real Ambulance chasers!!
see phto of monument:-
http://www.davison.k12.mi.us/academic/africa/soweto4.htm
Now here is another ambulance chasher. Yes Bill Clinton in Soweto.
"At the Hector Peterson memorial in Soweto, Mr Clinton lay a wreath
in memory of the black children shot by police in 1976. "
"This solemn place commemorates forever the death of one young boy,
a death that shocked the world into a new recognition of the vast evil of
apartheid," Mr Clinton told a gathering of South African dignitaries.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/special_report/1998/03/98/africa/70866.stm
It is so sad that things have turned out this way. Hopefully, those to come
will reclaim dignity and stand up for Africa.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Ivinicus factus sum veritabem diceus." ( I have become an enemy for speaking the truth ) St Paul!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mitayo Potosi
From: "Mitayo Potosi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>_________________________________________________________________
The Photograph of the dying Lulu in the arms of her brother Hector
Petersen was the utmost symbol and catalyst to send the world into a
revolt against apartheid South African.
It is the June 1976 children's revolt that shattered the Boer confidence, and
hence the panic for some 'solution' that has resulted into the release of Mandela,
etc......
That dogs like Justice minister, Penuell Maduna, Finance minister, Trevor Manuel,
have guts to denigrate the children who brouth down apartheid is the height of infamy.
We should hang the whole lot of them, Mandela, Mbeki, Zuma and all the shit.
How much abuse are we supposed to endure, brothers and sisters?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Ivinicus factus sum veritabem diceus." ( I have become an enemy for speaking the truth ) St Paul!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mitayo Potosi
From: "Vukoni Lupa-Lasaga" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
S Africa shuns apartheid lawsuits
Country needs investment, say ministers, not compensation
Rory Carroll in Johannesburg
Wednesday November 27, 2002
The Guardian
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 Mr 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 $1.25bn (£800m) to Holocaust survivors, has cited a figure of $50bn 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.
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