Groups representing some of South Africa’s white minority on Saturday responded to a plan by US President Donald Trump to offer them refugee status and resettlement in the US by saying: Thanks, but no thanks.
The plan was detailed in an executive order Trump signed on Friday that stopped all aid and financial assistance to South Africa as punishment for what the Trump administration said were “rights violations” by the government against some of its white citizens.
The Trump administration accused the South African government of allowing violent attacks on white Afrikaner farmers and introducing a land expropriation law that enables it to “seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.”
Photo: Reuters
The South African government has denied there are any concerted attacks on white farmers and has said that Trump’s description of the new land law is full of misinformation and distortions.
Whites make up about 7 percent of South Africa’s population of 62 million.
On Saturday, two of the most prominent groups representing Afrikaners said they would not be taking up Trump’s offer of resettlement in the US.
“Our members work here, and want to stay here, and they are going to stay here,” said Dirk Hermann, chief executive of the Afrikaner trade union Solidarity, which says it represents around 2 million people. “We are committed to build a future here. We are not going anywhere.”
At the same news conference, Kallie Kriel, the CEO of the Afrikaner lobby group AfriForum, also spoke out.
“We have to state categorically: We don’t want to move elsewhere,” he said.
Trump’s move to sanction South Africa, a key US trading partner in the region, came after he and his South African-born adviser Elon Musk have accused its black leadership of having an anti-white stance.
However, the portrayal of Afrikaners as a downtrodden group that needed to be saved would surprise most South Africans.
“It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged,” the South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation said.
It also criticized the Trump administration’s own policies, saying the focus on Afrikaners came “while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship.”
There was “a campaign of misinformation and propaganda” aimed at South Africa, the ministry said.
Despite being a small minority, whites own about 70 percent of South Africa’s private farmland. A study in 2021 by the South Africa Human Rights Commission said that 1 percent of whites were living in poverty compared with 64 percent of blacks.
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