By Brendan Boyle
CAPE TOWN, Nov 21 (Reuters) - South Africa's last white president on Thursday stood by the companies that traded with his minority government a decade ago and criticised lawyers trying to claim compensation for the victims of apartheid.
Former President F.W. de Klerk has advised banks, oil companies and other firms that traded with the whites-only government in the last decades of minority rule to fight claims by U.S. lawyers for compensation to victims of apartheid.
On Thursday, De Klerk said through his spokesman in Cape Town that the separate court actions by at least two U.S. lawyers were misplaced.
"We believe very strongly that the main underlying cause for the disappearance of apartheid was in fact the economic growth that was spurred by the international banks," spokesman Dave Steward told Reuters.
Lawyers filed the latest suit in a U.S. federal court on November 11 and are expected to seek billions of dollars from 20 banks, oil companies, auto makers and others for victims of white rule.
In a separate case, flamboyant U.S. lawyer Edward Fagan filed a suit in New York in June citing a similar range of companies he alleged had helped prop up apartheid.
Fagan told Reuters at the time that the $100 billion paid out in various ways to victims of the Nazi holocaust should serve as a guideline for the apartheid claim.
Steward said De Klerk, who was travelling in Europe on Thursday, believed the law suits were raising false hopes of enrichment amongst poor South Africans.
"We have our own processes in South Africa and there is no need for these American lawyers to barge in...and cause mischief in South Africa.
"People are expecting compensation of some kind and they are going to be disappointed when it does not occur," Steward said.
SOCIAL DAMAGE
Neville Gabriel, one of the South Africans backing the latest claim, said in a response to similar comments De Klerk made in an interview in Germany this week that the former president was more concerned for the funders of apartheid than for the victims of white rule.
"Mr de Klerk's acknowledgement that Swiss banks actively contributed to the growth of the apartheid economy reinforced our claim against the banks to repair the social damage they made possible," Gabriel said in a statement.
Three centuries of white domination and nearly 50 years of formal segregation known as apartheid left most of the black majority in dire poverty in 1994, when Nelson Mandela became the first black and democratically chosen president.
De Klerk shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela in 1993 for promoting a peaceful transfer of power, but went to court to suppress critical comments in the final report of Archbishop Desmond Tutu's post-apartheid Truth Commission.
Steward said De Klerk was concerned that a precedent for compensation from companies that trade with illegitimate regimes would undermine trade with many countries in Africa and the Middle East and with China.
"If one were to admit this principle that any company that does business with any state that has violated human rights - and that was definitely the case with apartheid -- is open to court cases, there would be chaos," he said.