(Adnkronos) – The Afrikaners welcomed by Donald Trump’s United States as refugees did not face “any kind of persecution” at home. This is what the Pretoria government declared a few hours after a first group of 49 white South Africans, mostly descendants of the Dutch settlers who imposed a regime of racial segregation in South Africa until 1994 that denied political and economic rights to the black population, left Johannesburg on a US-funded charter flight.
“They could not provide any evidence of discrimination because there is no form of persecution of white South Africans or Afrikaners,” said Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola, recalling how “several organizations, including Afrikaner structures, have denounced this alleged persecution” as a false narrative.
A narrative that Trump, echoing what his advisor Elon Musk, who was born and raised in South Africa, wrote on social media, relaunched, denouncing an alleged “white genocide” in support of his decision to offer refugee status to whites who want to leave South Africa. A policy in stark contrast to that adopted for the rest of the world by the Trump administration has practically blocked entry to refugees fleeing hunger and wars.
Not only. While normally the process to obtain refugee status takes years, a super fast track was adopted for white South Africans and the first group – chosen from the 8,000 applications received at the US embassy – arrives in the US today after only three months from the signing of Trump’s executive order. White South Africans make up 7.3% of the South African population, but own half of the country’s agricultural land.
To rebalance this situation, President Cyril Ramaphosa in recent months signed a new agrarian law which allows, in extreme cases where landowners refuse to sell the land voluntarily, the expropriation of agricultural land, in cases considered very rare and always with the approval of the judicial authorities.
The law has been strongly contested by the leaders of the Afrikaner community who have denounced the confiscation of white land, an argument that Trump has made accusing the South African government of “doing terrible and horrible things”.
