By Enyichukwu Enemanna
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has mocked the US’s decision to prioritise refugee applications from white Afrikaners, saying claims of a white genocide in the Southern African nation is untrue and lack reliable evidence.
South African government cited an open letter published by prominent members of the Afrikaner community earlier this week rejecting Trump’s genocide narrative, with some signatories calling the relocation scheme “racist”.
Pretoria says the limited number of white South African Afrikaners signing up to relocate to the US was indication that they were not being persecuted.
Heritage Times HT had on Thursday reported that the administration of US President Donald Trump announced a 7,500 refugee annual cap, the lowest in history.
The exact figures of the number of white South Africans who have been admitted through the US scheme are not available.
Earlier this year, President Trump offered refugee status to Afrikaners, who are mostly descendants of Dutch and French settlers after South African President Cyril Ramaphosa signed a law allowing the government to seize land without compensation in rare instances.
In May when President Ramaphosa visited the White House to mend fences with Washington over strained relations, Trump confronted him and claimed that white farmers in South Africa were being killed and “persecuted”.
President Trump held up a photo purporting to show body bags containing the remains of white people in South Africa, but the Reuters news agency later identified the photo as one of their own taken thousands of miles away in the war-struck Democratic Republic of Congo.
The White House also played a video which they said showed burial sites for murdered white farmers.
It later emerged that the videos were scenes from a 2020 protest in which the crosses represented farmers killed over multiple years ago.
