Rath: ‘Apartheid was a pharmaceutical plot’
 
Cape Town, South Africa 
 
 
 
10 May 2007 04:45
 
The apartheid regime was part of a global plot by the pharmaceutical industry, according to vitamin entrepreneur Dr Matthias Rath.

He said in an affidavit filed in the Cape High Court: “This regime was the political arm to turn South Africa into a bridgehead of the pharmaceutical interests with the goal to conquer and control the entire African continent.”

He also said the operations of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) were “almost a copy” of Hitler’s brown-shirt storm troopers.

The affidavit was lodged in reply to an application by TAC and the South African Medical Association for an order against Rath and his Dr Rath Health Foundation Africa. They have asked the court to interdict Rath from distributing unregistered medicines, conducting unauthorised clinical trials and making false claims about multivitamins in advertisements.

In his 320-page affidavit, accompanied by eight lever-arch files of documents, Rath said that after eliminating competition from the field of natural health and consolidating its global interests during World War II, pharmaceutical interests had dedicated the second half of the 20th century to cementing their global monopoly on health.

“The apartheid regime in South Africa was part of this global strategy,” he said. “The apartheid regime became its political stakeholder.”

He said that after World War II, thousands of high-ranking Nazi party members used the “corporate channels” of the massive German chemical-manufacturing conglomerate IG Farben to find safe haven in South Africa, where IG Farben had established subsidiaries. Also seeking refuge in this country were thousands of IG Farben managers who had participated in war crimes.

“Together with their ongoing economic interests — namely chemical/pharmaceutical business interests — they brought their extensive ‘know how’ in building and ‘managing’ a totalitarian regime to South Africa.

“Much the same as previously in Europe, their goal was to establish a dictatorship serving these corporate interests while keeping the majority of the population ‘under control’,” Rath said.

The chemical and pharmaceutical industry became the economic pillar of the apartheid regime, and South Africa became a stronghold for pharmaceutical companies.

Rath said the goal of the “brown shirts” had been to destabilise a democratically elected German government on behalf of corporate interests and their political stakeholders. The TAC’s goal, he said, was to attack the South African government, destabilise the political situation and establish a new political leadership that would voluntarily spend millions on “toxic” antiretroviral drugs.

The court case was to have started last month, but was postponed because Rath filed his affidavit 13 months late.

Rath, who appears to have the tacit support of ailing Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, has come under fire for suggesting that vitamins are preferable to antiretrovirals as a treatment for Aids. His own vitamin products have been handed out free in Khayelitsha in Cape Town, which the TAC says is illegal. — Sapa