Trump says some white South Africans are oppressed and could be resettled in the US. They say no thanks – The Associated Press
Source: Associated Press
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President Donald Trump speaks at a dinner with Senate Republicans at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., Friday, Feb. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa delivers a speech during a plenary session in the Congress Hall, during the 55th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. (Michael Buholzer/Keystone via AP)
Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa, right uses a shuttle the Annual Meeting of World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
People place white crosses representing farmers killed in the country at a ceremony at the Vorrtrekker Monument in Pretoria, South Africa, Oct. 30, 2017. (AP Photo, File)
FILE- A farm employee spreads fertilizer on the farm of John Rankin, a commercial farmer producing Maze and Corn on an industrial level, in Gerdau, North West province, South Africa, Nov. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Groups representing some of South Africa’s white minority responded Saturday to a plan by President Donald Trump to offer them refugee status and resettlement in the United States by saying: thanks, but no thanks.
The plan was detailed in an executive order Trump signed 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.”
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.
Afrikaners are descended from mainly Dutch, but also French and German colonial settlers who first arrived in South Africa more than 300 years ago. They speak Afrikaans, a language derived from Dutch that developed in South Africa, and are distinct from other white South Africans who come from British or other backgrounds.
Together, whites make up around 7% 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 U.S.
“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 press conference, Kallie Kriel, the CEO of the Afrikaner lobby group AfriForum, said: “We have to state categorically: We don’t want to move elsewhere.”
Trump’s move to sanction South Africa, a key U.S. trading partner in Africa, came after he and his South African-born adviser Elon Musk have accused its Black leadership of having an anti-white stance. But 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 U.S. for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged,” South Africa’s Foreign Ministry said. It also criticized the Trump administration’s own policies, saying the focus on Afrikaners came “while vulnerable people in the U.S. 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.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesperson said: “South Africa is a constitutional democracy. We value all South Africans, Black and white. The assertion that Afrikaners face arbitrary deprivation and, therefore, need to flee the country of their birth is an assertion devoid of all truth.”
Whites in South Africa still generally have a much better standard of living than Blacks more than 30 years after the end of the apartheid system of white minority rule in 1994. Despite being a small minority, whites own around 70% of South Africa’s private farmland. A study in 2021 by the South Africa Human Rights Commission said 1% of whites were living in poverty compared to 64% of Blacks.
Sithabile Ngidi, a market trader in Johannesburg, said she hadn’t seen white people being mistreated in South Africa.
“He (Trump) should have actually come from America to South Africa to try and see what was happening for himself and not just take the word of an Elon Musk, who hasn’t lived in this country for the longest of time, who doesn’t even relate to South Africans,” Ngidi said.
But Trump’s action against South Africa has given international attention to a
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