Lungisile Ntsebeza remembers well the day the police came for him. It was a cold June night in 1976, and he was just 21. He had recently graduated from South Africa's most prestigious black university.

Mr. Ntsebeza was hauled off and spent 5-1/2 years in prison, followed by six years in exile in a tiny town in the desolate Eastern Cape. His crime: Participating in a study group examining alternatives to South Africa's racially segregated society, apartheid.

A quarter of a century later, Ntsebeza now wants someone to pay for his lost youth. Promised reparations from South Africa's current government that have never materialized, Ntsebeza and others are turning to sources with deeper pockets: the international banks and corporations that did business with the white apartheid government.

Lawyers for apartheid victims have filed two multibillion-dollar class-action lawsuits in United States courts, one last June and one earlier this month.

"It's simple. This is a lawsuit against institutions that collaborated with a system that had been declared a crime against humanity," says Ntsebeza, who is party to one of the lawsuits. "One could say I'm vindictive, but I don't think so. If you profit out of an immoral system, them you must be prepared to pay."

Among the 20 targeted banks and corporations are IBM, Ford, General Motors, ExxonMobil, Citigroup, and JP Morgan Chase in the US, and British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, and DaimlerChrysler in Europe. These companies say they violated no international law and should not be held accountable for the actions of others. Some have pledged to vigorously fight the suits.

If successful, activists say, the lawsuits could change the rules for international lending, forcing private banks to be more accountable for the uses of the money they lend. Some academics also warn it could make banks warier of lending to governments that truly need it.

"These lawsuits could be very destabilizing," says Seema Jayachandran, an economics researcher at Harvard University who has written extensively about the lawsuits. "If banks make a loan and worry that after the fact they may get hit with a lawsuit ... they may be wary of loaning. That might hurt governments that want to make legitimate loans that are beneficial to the people."

At the root of the two lawsuits is both a frustration with how the current South African government (which took over from the apartheid regime in 1994) has handled reconciliation and an acknowledgement of the economic challenges it faces.

South Africa is saddled with billions of dollars in debt and is struggling to educate, feed, and house its people. The much lauded truth and reconciliation process gave amnesty to most of the killers and torturers of the apartheid era, but little has been done for the survivors.

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