Cape Town, South Africa (AP) – groups representing Part of the white minority of South Africa responded to Saturday to A plan by President Donald Trump To offer them the status and resettlement of refugees to the United States saying: Thank you, but no thank you.
The plan was detailed in a decree that Trump signed on Friday who stopped all aid and financial assistance in South Africa as a punishment for what the Trump administration said they were “rights violations” by the government Against some of its white citizens.
The Trump administration accused the South African government of having authorized violent attacks on Afrikaner White farmers and the introduction A law on land expropriation This allows him to “grasp the agricultural property of the ethnic minorities of ethnic minorities without compensation”.
The South African government denied that there were concerted attacks on white farmers and said that Trump’s description of the new land law was Full of disinformation and distortions.
The Afrikaners descend mainly from the French and German colonial colonial settlers who arrived for the first time In South Africa Over 300 years ago. They speak Afrikaans, a language derived from Dutch who have developed in South Africa, and are distinct from other white South Africans who come from British or others.
Together, whites represent around 7% of the South African population of 62 million inhabitants.
On Saturday, two of the most eminent groups representing Afrikaners said they would not take Trump’s resettlement supply in the United States
“Our members work here and want to stay here, and they will stay here,” said Dirk Hermann, Managing Director of the Afrikaner Trade Union Solidarity, who says it represents around 2 million people. “We are committed to building a future here. We are not going anywhere.
At the same press conference, Kallie Kriel, CEO of the Afrikaner Lobby Afriforum group, said: “We have to categorically assert: we do not want to move elsewhere.”
Trump’s decision to sanction South Africa, an American trading partner in Africa, came after him and his South African advisor Elon Musk have accused his black direction of having an anti-white position. But the representation of Afrikaners as an oppressed group which was to be saved would surprise most of the South Africans.
“It is ironic that the decree does not provide for refugee status in the United States for a group in South Africa which remains among the most economically privileged,” said the Ministry of Affairs of South Africa. He also criticized the own policies of the Trump administration, saying that the accent on Afrikaners has come “while vulnerable people in the United States for other parts of the world are expelled and refused asylum despite real difficulties ”.
There was “a disinformation and propaganda campaign” intended for South Africa, the ministry said.
Whites in South Africa still generally have a much better that blacks over 30 years after the end of White minority rule system In 1994. Although it is a small minority, whites still hold around 70% of private agricultural land from South Africa. A study in 2021 of the Southern Human Rights Commission said that 1% of whites lived in poverty against 64% of blacks.
Sithabile Ngidi, a market merchant in Johannesburg, said that she had not seen white -mistreated whites in South Africa.
“He (Trump) should have come from America to South Africa to try to see what was going on for himself and not just to speak of an Elon Musk, who did not live in this country during The longest, which is not “is not even linked to South Africans,” said Ngidi.
But Trump’s action against South Africa has paid international attention to a feeling among some white South Africans against whom they are discriminated against as a form of recovery for apartheid. The leaders of the apartheid government were Afrikaners.
Solidarity, Afriforum and others are strongly opposed to the new land expropriation law, claiming that it will target land belonging to whites that have worked to develop these lands for years. They also say that an equally controversial linguistic law recently adopted seeks to abolish or limit their Afrikaan language in schools, when they have often criticized South African positive action policies in affairs that promote The interests of blacks as racist laws.
“This government allows a certain part of the population to be targeted,” said Kriel d’Afriforum, who thanked Trump for raising the case of Afrikaners.
The South African government claims that the laws that have been criticized target the incredibly difficult task to repair the wrongs of colonialism, then almost half a century of apartheid, when the blacks were stripped of their land and almost all their rights.
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The journalist of Associated Press Sebabatso Mosamo in Johannesburg contributed to this report.
