I reported yesterday on moves in the US to hold Western multinationals accountable that behaved badly during the apartheid era in South Africa.
Marjorie Jobson, the national director of the South African Khulumani Support Group that filed the lawsuit, tells Democracy Now! what the focus is (and why many of us are thinking about similar future cases against corporates complicit in Israeli occupation):
Well, the remaining five companies in our lawsuits are the ones that we’ve been able to retain on the basis that the equipments that they produced and sold to the South African apartheid regime was directly used in suppressing the uprising against apartheid. It was the armored vehicles that patrolled the townships. It was the weapons and ammunition that were used by the soldiers in those armored vehicles to put down resistance. And it was also the software and the hardware produced by IBM that was used to track and monitor the movements of black activists and also to denationalize most of the black South African population, who were denied South African citizenship and had to become members of homelands, often of homelands that they had never ever visited.