They are the one refugee group that has Donald Trump‘s sympathy — white South African residents offered asylum by the president who said they were victims of “egregious” persecution by their government because of their race.
On February 7 Trump issued an executive order that “directed government officials to prioritize the resettlement of South Africans of European descent through the U.S. refugee program, which he suspended during his first day in office.”
The president cited a South African law that allows some expropriation of land without compensation to the prior owners, most if not all of whom secured their privileged position under the racist apartheid regime that ended in 1992.
Trump has misrepresented the law as a measure to persecute white Afrikaners by seizing their farms without compensation.
His decision followed seven years of lobbying by AfriForum, whom The Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “white supremacists in suits and ties.” The group is also acting on behalf of the business interests of South African native Elon Musk, who has shared their false claims suggesting an imminent genocide against whites, reports The Guardian.
Insiders say Musk seeks to skirt laws preventing him from selling his Starlink satellite network in South Africa, which requires foreign investors in the country’s telecoms sector provide 30 percent of the equity in the South African part of the enterprise to Black-owned businesses. The law is intended to uplift people of color oppressed by apartheid by requiring major business deals to include Black investors.
Musk, who grew up in the apartheid era, has accused South Africa of “openly racist ownership laws.” AfriForum likewise claims that Starlink is being prevented from doing business in South Africa because it is “too white” and is subject to “strict race-based criteria.”
Musk and AfriForum have grouped the killing of white farmers, land redistribution laws and affirmative action programs into a single narrative that blames state-sponsored persecution of racial minorities by the ruling African National Congress.
AfriForum has dismissed apartheid as a “so-called” historical injustice. Its chief executive, Kallie Kriel, claims apartheid was not a crime against humanity because not enough people were killed during the decades of white minority rule.
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission determined there were 7,000 political deaths under apartheid rule between 1948 and 1989, with 73 of those deaths occurring in detention camps at the hands of the security police. More than 19,050 people were victims of gross human rights violations, the commission found.
But to AfriForum, whites are the true victims. They began lobbying the first Trump administration in 2018 after the ANC began a land redistribution plan.
Kriel and his deputy, Ernst Roets, highlighted what they called the “persecution of South Africa’s minorities” by exploiting the country’s high murder rate.
But unlike in neighboring Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe unleashed violence against white landowners in the early 2000s in a land redistribution plan intended to bolster his unpopular regime, South Africa’s white farmers weren’t targeted by the government but were merely victims of the country’s high crime rate.
None of the white South African farmers who have been murdered have then had their land confiscated.
But such facts were inconvenient to AfriForum’s campaign, which was embraced by white nationalists such as Tucker Carlson. In an appearance on Carlson’s Fox News program, Roets claimed Afrikaner farmers were being “tortured to death on farms in unusual ratios.”
Among those watching that night: Donald Trump, who tweeted an instruction to his then secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to “closely study the South African land farm seizures and expropriations and large scale killing of farmers.”
The president went on to call it “a massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum and is happening for all to see.”
In September, during the height of Musk’s dispute with the South African government, AfriForum launched a campaign on his behalf that claimed Black empowerment laws were making white farmers more vulnerable to attacks because they lacked proper communications that Starlink could provide.
“By prohibiting Starlink from operating in South Africa because of racist criteria, [the government] is depriving rural communities of a reliable alternative that may save lives,” it said.
South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, called Musk the day after Trump signed his executive order in an attempt to soothe tensions. The country’s communications minister suggested an exemption for Starlink from the Black empowerment rules, but other members of the government object and are unlikely to be swayed by Trump’s intervention, according to The Guardian.
Meanwhile, Afrikaners, aware that having the president’s support brings them closer to their objective of toppling their country’s government and returning to the days of white minority rule, have rejected the president’s resettlement offer.
