The president of the United States, Donald Trump, has almost completely canceled asylum programs to foreigners and carries out mass deportation policies against irregular immigrants. But it makes a clamorous exception: the Afrikaners farmers (descendants of European settlers) of South Africa, of which the US administration ensures that they are target of serious discrimination by the South African government. In February, it was launched for them. And this Monday the first 59 beneficiaries have arrived. Meanwhile, applicants from countries such as Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Sudan are blocked their procedures.
The Afrikáners group, which was traveling on a charter flight charted by the State Department, landed after noon, around 18.30 (Spanish peninsular time), at Dulles International airport, on the outskirts of Washington, in the state of Virginia. Shortly after, the newcomers were divided to address other flights to their final destinations, in various parts of the country. Some of them will be installed in Minnesota, according to the Reuters agency. The rest, in Republican states, especially from the south of the country, such as Alabama.
In the White House, where he appeared before the press before undertaking a tour of the Arabic monarchies of the Persian Gulf, he has defended his policy. The Republican has denied that he intends to favor white asylum seekers while harming others, and has alleged without apparent foundation that a massacre of white farmers is being carried out in the African country. “What is happening is a genocide that you (journalists) do not want to write,” said the Republican. “It is something terrible what is happening, farmers are being killed. It turns out that they are white, but they are white or black to me.”
But since February, a few days after the investiture of January 20, his administration has been very hostile towards the government of President Cyril Ramaphosa, which he accuses of applying flagrant discrimination against white farmers. In addition to having launched the reception program for this minority, the White House has also canceled, through an executive order, the financial assistance funds to South Africa, to which the Trump administration also reproaches to have appeared in for possible genocide in Gaza.
Trump and his team allege, to justify their accusations of discrimination against South Africa, that this country has approved a law that facilitates the expropriation of private properties. The measure is one of the most recent in a series of steps in the last 30 years that seek to stop some of the deep inequalities caused by the apartheidthe racial segregation system that denied rights to the majority of the black population in that country until 1991.
But the new legislation, according to the White House, allows to seize agricultural properties to the “ethnic minority of Afrikáners without compensation.” The US president also accuses South Africa of promoting “a rhetoric of hate” that encourages “disproportionate violence against racially disadvantaged land owners.”
Trump’s allegations have been welcomed with surprise in South Africa, where the Ramaphosa government has assured that the Republican Administration “has understood bad things.” Praetoria defends that there is no evidence that a persecution against the white minority and much less a genocide against this group is carried out.
“We have expressed our concern because people who have been persuaded to go to the United States do not conform to the definition of refugees. A refugee is someone who has to leave his country for fear of political, religious or economic persecution,” Ramaphosa denounced at a summit of the African private sector in Ivory Coast, Efe reports.
“Those who have fled are not being persecuted, they are not being harassed, they are not being mistreated and leave because, ostensibly, they do not want to accept the changes that are taking place in our country according to our Constitution. So we believe that the US government has understood it badly, but we will continue talking to them,” said the South African president.
South Africa has pointed out that the government has not confiscated any type of land and that the law referred to Trump aims apartheid 30 years ago: only 4% of private property lands are in the hands of black owners, while the white minority, 8% of the population, controls three quarters of the total.
