SACRAMENTO — California's giant public pension systems must rid themselves of investments in companies that help the Sudanese government, under a measure that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law Monday.
University of California students and others who led a campaign for divestment said they hoped that it would persuade other states to do the same. Ultimately, they want to pressure the Arab-dominated government of Sudan, which is blamed for the deaths of at least 200,000 non-Arabs since 2003 and the displacement of more than 2.5 million people in the nation's western Darfur region.
"Divestment will show our defiance against the murderers and their inhumanity," Schwarzenegger said at a bill-signing ceremony at the Hilton Burbank Airport and Convention Center, recalling that a similar divestment movement two decades ago helped end apartheid in South Africa.
Joining him at the ceremony were actors Don Cheadle and George Clooney, and UC student activist Adam Sterling. "State by state, pension fund by pension fund, your genocide will not occur on our watch and it will not occur on our dime," Sterling vowed.
When the law takes effect in January, it will require the California Public Employees' Retirement System and the California Teachers' Retirement System to liquidate their holdings in certain companies that operate in Sudan if, after 90 days' warning, the companies fail to halt business activities there.
About two dozen oil, energy and telecommunications firms -- most of them Chinese, Russian, Malaysian, Indian or French -- are the targets of the divestment, said Jason Miller, a UC San Francisco medical student who, with Sterling, helped create the Sudan Divestment Task Force.
The bill, AB 2941 by Assemblyman Paul Koretz (D-West Hollywood), is narrowly tailored to force divestment of only those companies that provide revenue or weapons to the Sudanese government and refuse to change their practices.
No American companies are on the list for potential divestment, Miller said, and American companies must get U.S. permission to do business in Sudan because the nation is considered a state sponsor of terrorism.
Miller conceded that divestment of the two state pension systems won't be enough to change the stock price of any potential divestment targets.
But he and others see the Koretz bill as model legislation that may spur enough divestment nationwide to pressure the companies and thus Sudan.
