South African President Cyril Ramaphosa described them as “cowards,” according to the BBC.
On May 22, during a meeting with Ramaphosa in the Oval Office, Trump presented what he said was evidence of this.
Showing printouts of news articles and footage of South African extremists calling for white farmers to be killed, Trump repeated the allegation that the South African government is confiscating white-owned land.
When Ramaphosa denied this, Trump maintained: “You do allow them to take land—and then when they take the land, they kill the white farmer, and when they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them.
“You’re taking people’s land away from them, and those people, in many cases, are being executed. They’re being executed, and they happen to be white.”
South Africa’s International Relations Minister, Ronald Lamola, told The Epoch Times that Trump and his administration are “totally misguided” in offering asylum to Afrikaners.
“Who can provide proof of any persecution of a specific race in South Africa?” he asked. “There’s no proof. There’s no type of persecution or discrimination against any whites in South Africa.”
The Epoch Times has been told by a source connected to the U.S. Embassy in Johannesburg that many of the 8,000 Afrikaner applications for asylum reviewed so far contain “horrific details” of crimes committed against them or their close relatives.
“They believe these crimes happened to them because they are white,” said the source, requesting anonymity because he did not have permission to speak with the media.
“These crimes were documented in cases opened by the South African police, and in many cases the perpetrators have never been found. These people can’t get any information about what’s happened to their cases. It appears there have been no investigations.”
On May 13, the first group of 59 Afrikaners was welcomed in Washington by Deputy Secretary of State, Christopher Landau, and Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, Troy Edgar.
He said “a fair number” of the asylum seekers that had arrived in the United States were farmers who had farmed their land for generations.
“Now, [they] face the threat—not only of expropriation—but also of direct violence … Many of these folks have experience with threatening invasions of their homes—their farms—and a real lack of interest or success of the government in doing anything about this situation,” Landau said.
Hours earlier, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that there’s a genocide in South Africa, with the victims often white farmers.
“Whether they’re white or black makes no difference to me,” said Trump. “But white farmers are brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.”
Pretoria says the “nil compensation” clause in the act will only be used when it is “equitable and in the public interest.”
At the moment, “there’s no state-supported confiscation of farms happening,” said Jaco Minnaar, who heads South Africa’s largest agricultural association, AgriSA.
But, he told The Epoch Times, white-owned farms are “frequently” invaded.
“These land invasions are often instigated by local politicians and radical groups. A farmer will wake up and there will be a large group of people occupying a section of his farm,” Minnaar said.
“In many cases the police are slow to act, or they don’t act at all, and the large group turns into a squatter camp, and the farm is rendered worthless.”
Bennie van Zyl, who leads the Transvaal Agricultural Union, which represents thousands of Afrikaner farmers, told The Epoch Times the murders of white farmers and their families are often “very brutal, with torture involved, but it can’t yet be defined as a white genocide … and there’s no evidence that the government is involved.”
Lamola said the murders of white farmers are “part of a normal crime trend.”
However, University of Stellenbosch criminologist Guy Lamb said there’s “nothing normal” about crime in South Africa.
“The country has one of the highest murder and rape rates in the world,” he told The Epoch Times. “There’s a sense that South Africans of all races are under siege from criminals, with the state unable to protect them. So the fact that Trump’s Afrikaners are telling the U.S. government horror stories about crime is not shocking at all. Most South Africans have similar stories to tell.”
Isolated in rural areas, white farmers in particular are “easy targets,” Lamb said.
“They’re attacked not because they’re white, but because they’re perceived to have money and firearms,” he said.
Max du Preez, a veteran South African journalist, described South Africa as “a country at war with itself.”
“Look, we aren’t Ukraine where cities are being bombed. But we are a country where a lot of men consider rape to be a sport,” he told The Epoch Times: “We are a country where murder is extremely common and very few are ever solved. Violent crime is everywhere.”
The country’s official unemployment rate is almost 33 percent. An expanded definition of unemployment, which includes those who’ve given up looking for work, is more than 43 percent.
Du Preez said, “So we have millions of black people, especially jobless youth, with nothing to do all day. They’re angry. If there’s going to be a race revolution, this is where it’s coming from. It’s a ticking time bomb.”
He said Trump’s executive order and offer of asylum to Afrikaners “is part of a narrative of fear that’s been pervasive in white South Africa, and elsewhere, for generations: The fear of a black uprising that results in the mass killing of whites similar to the Rwandan genocide … The fear that blacks finally take revenge on whites for apartheid.”
Several leftist and extremist groups in South Africa have suggested exactly this.
Julius Malema, the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), South Africa’s fourth largest political party, often sings a song called “Kill the farmer,” and has said a “revolution” of poor black people is coming to drive whites out of South Africa.
Professor Hein Willemse of the Afrikaans Department at the University of Pretoria, said many Afrikaners feel “besieged.”
“Land is very important to the Afrikaner. Most successful commercial farmers are Afrikaners,” he told The Epoch Times.
“Take their land away and take away their rights to mother tongue education—which we also see happening—and their rights to employment, through affirmative action, plus the fact that they’re often victims of crime, and they feel backed into a corner. They feel their culture is being erased.”
“Must whites in South Africa continuously bend the knee in gratitude that we haven’t been exterminated yet?” asked Kallie Kriel, who leads Afrikaner rights organization AfriForum. “In this context, President Trump’s offer is a tremendous acknowledgement, they feel someone in power, the most powerful political leader on earth, is listening to them and recognizing their fear and suffering.”
He said South Africa is “a mix of privileged whites and privileged blacks.”
“Of course there will be millions more blacks in poverty. I mean, look at the population numbers,” said Kriel.
“These critics can come see for themselves what it’s like to live in so-called ‘white privilege.’ These Afrikaners now in America, I wish them all the best.”
