Patrick Bond wrote:" <snip>
> The key thing, I've been arguing (maybe or maybe not correctly) is to
> locate specific incidents and institutions that need disciplining,
> like the World Bank's $200 mn in loans to apartheid SA, including
> $100 mn for white folks' electricity (while townships were still
> dark) between 1951-67. That money plus interest should be repaid, not
> just for past justice, but to enforce the point to int'l lenders that
> if they fund dictators they may get called on it in future. Once a
> few key institutions are nailed, it will be easier to get general
> principles of liability established. The WB and Citi are good
> targets, but there are plenty others, including apartheid
> sanctions-buster Marc Rich.
>
<snip>
Yes..."correctly".... best to start with the clearest case. I was once retained by a newly sovereign African state to give them a memo on the question of reparations for a particular tribal unit still in existence but nearly exterminated (and of course their territory stolen) by a pre-WWI colonial power. The only useful precedent was that power's reparations to Jews. There were some interesting questions of succession, but easily analyzable within existing international law categories. Though no litigation ensued, I was told that some moneys have in fact been forthcoming through the reciprocal pressures of diplomatic intercourse.
I was particularly interested to see if any successors of specific corporate entities could be identified as possible defendants. The abuse (that Norman Finkelstein has so correctly identified) of these ideas by the more scumbag plaintiffs lawyers shouldn't take away their utility. An excellent example is the suit in the German courts crafted by the excellent Rainer Arzinger (an Ossie from the old SED) on behalf of his client the Slovakian Jewish community organization against the Deutsche Bahn. The defendant's corporate predecessor had required that the plaintiff's corporate predecessor pay for the involuntary transportation to their deaths of the members of the plaintiff's corporate predecessor. Rainer is asking for the money back with compound interest.
john mage