A U.S. appeals court is hearing arguments from a group of multinational corporations seeking to block a lawsuit brought by South African victims of apartheid.
The suit seeks up to $400 billion in compensation for the Black victims.
The corporations are accused of complicity in human-rights abuses during the years they did business in apartheid South Africa.
 After years of legal delays, a US court last year gave the green light for the companies to be sued on US soil under the Alien Tort Claims Act.

The companies - Daimler AG, General Motors, Ford Motor Company and IBM – were cited in the suite because they had refused to testify during the truth and reconciliation process about their actions during the apartheid years.

Recalling the presence of Ford and GM in Port Elizabeth, the late poet Dennis Brutus, in a previous interview with the news show Democracy Now, recalled “…both Ford and GM were using black labor, but it was very cheap black labor, because blacks were not allowed to join trade unions, and they were not allowed to strike, so that they were forced to accept whatever wages they were given.

“They lived in ghettos near where I lived, actually in the boxes in which the parts had been shipped from the US to be assembled in South Africa. So you had a whole township called Kwaford, meaning the place of Ford, and it was all Ford boxes with the name “Ford” on them, because they were addressed to Ford in Port Elizabeth.”

Michael Hausfeld, representing the black South Africans, said: “If companies can affect lives in ways that make those lives worse, so that people are suppressed or terrorized, as we contend the apartheid regime was towards its black South Africans, then anyone who provided the tools to enforce that suppression and terrorism should be responsible.”
 German automaker Daimler called the charges "inadmissible and unfounded."

South Africa ended its opposition to the case in September, shortly after President Jacob Zuma took office. The previous president, Thabo Mbeki, opposed the case on the grounds that it might put off foreign investors.

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source: GIN