President Trump accused South Africa Monday of participating in “genocide” in opposition to its white minority as the primary planeload of Afrikaners granted refugee standing touched down within the US.
“It’s a genocide that’s happening that you simply individuals don’t wish to write about,” Trump advised reporters on the White Home earlier than signing an govt order meant to scale back drug costs.
“It’s a horrible factor that’s happening and farmers are being killed,” he added. “They occur to be white, however whether or not they’re white or black makes no distinction to me.”
Trump signed an govt order Feb. 7 freezing help to South Africa in response to a legislation handed final yr permitting the bulk black authorities to “seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property with out compensation,” within the phrases of the White Home.
Precisely a month later, the president announced that “any farmer” fleeing South Africa can come to America and obtain a “fast pathway” to citizenship.
On Monday, 49 Afrikaners, descendants of primarily Dutch settlers who arrived on the southern tip of Africa within the mid-1600s, landed at Dulles Worldwide Airport in northern Virginia.
The US gave South Africa greater than $320 million in fiscal yr 2024, largely for well being and humanitarian help.
The Expropriation Act of 2024 was enacted following a 2017 examine that discovered white South Africans managed about 75% of individually-owned farms greater than twenty years after the top of apartheid — regardless of making up simply 7% of South Africa’s inhabitants.
“It’s most regrettable that it seems that the resettlement of South Africans to the US beneath the guise of being ‘refugees’ is fully politically motivated and designed to query South Africa’s constitutional democracy,” international ministry spokesperson Chrispin Phiri mentioned in an announcement.
South African Overseas Minister Ronald Lamola has in contrast the Expropriation Act to the apply of eminent area in America. However the Trump administration is standing by their criticisms.
“Afrikaners fleeing persecution are welcome in the US,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio mentioned on X Monday.
“The South African authorities has handled these individuals terribly — threatening to steal their non-public land and subjected them to vile racial discrimination. The Trump Administration is proud to supply them refuge in our nice nation.”
Trump adviser Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa and lived there for the primary 18 years of his life, has repeatedly criticized the federal government in latest months, stating on March 4 that “what’s occurring in South Africa is deeply fallacious. Not what [late former President Nelson] Mandela meant in any respect.”
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