Some Afrikaners applaud as Trump amplifies the claims of persecution

For decades, some members of the Afrikaner White minority tried to convince anyone and all those who listened to that they are the real victims in South Africa post-Apartheid.

They have made allegations of mass massacres of their people and seizures of land generalized by a government led by the blacks whom they insist to request reprisals for the sins of the apartheid government led by Afrikaner. Their stories were false or very exaggerated, but that did not prevent them from being largely amplified and repeated online.

Afrikaners, an ethnic group who descended from Europe – mainly Dutch – the colonizers, found a champion of their cause in President Trump, and it led to a moment that few of them could have imagined.

Friday, Mr. Trump put the weight of the American influence behind a highly contested affirmation according to which the Afrikaners were the “victims of unjust racial discrimination”, delivering a decree to allow them to migrate to the United States as that refugees, and to stop aid to South South Africa.

This decision encountered dismay in South Africa, a mainly black nation where more than 90% of the population comes from racial groups persecuted by the racist apartheid regime. These groups – black, colorful and Indian – remain statistically far behind the white minority in almost all economic measures.

There have been horrible murders of white farmers, at the center of the Afrikaner grievances, but police statistics suggest that they explain a very small share of the country’s murders.