Catholic leaders in South Africa have blasted the Trump Administration over claims of an ongoing genocide against white South Africans. Source: Crux.
US President Donald Trump recently claimed that “genocide” was taking place in South Africa. He said white farmers were being “brutally killed” and their “land is being confiscated”.
Mr Trump’s claim is apparently based on the fact that in January, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed a bill intended to address the land dispossession that black people faced during white-minority rule.
White farmers, most being Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, are descendants of Europeans who settled at the southern tip of Africa in the mid-17th century.
Over time, they developed a distinct cultural identity, but their expansion also led to the dispossession of African communities from their ancestral lands. In 1948, the Afrikaner-led government of South Africa instituted apartheid – an extreme system of racial segregation that entrenched inequality on a national scale.
Afrikaner dominance of South Africa ended in 1994, when black people were allowed to vote for the first time in a nationwide election, bringing Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) to power. The legacy of apartheid lived on.
The government of South Africa has therefore engaged in affirmative action, which aims to bridge the gap between black and white South Africans. That policy – which also includes land appropriation – has irked Mr Trump, who now claims white farmers are being discriminated against, and has granted them asylum statues.
Recently, a group of 59 white South Africans arrived in the US as refugees.
Johan Viljoen, director of the Denis Hurley Peace Institute of the South African Bishops’ Conference, dismissed the claim as baseless, saying there is “absolutely no evidence” to support allegations of genocide against whites or Afrikaans people in South Africa.
Mr Viljoen, himself an Afrikaner, argued that such statements reflect President Trump’s fundamental misunderstanding – either of the concept of genocide or of South Africa’s complex 400-year history.
“I think even to speak about it as genocide is belittling and insulting the whole idea, the whole concept of genocide,” Mr Viljoen said.
Chris Chatteris, of the Jesuit institute of Southern Africa, said most Afrikaners “are doing just fine.”
He said some feel insecure, as many minorities do in many places.
“Some of their ancestors were the architects of apartheid and so they probably worry that revenge will be taken upon them. However, the black population in South Africa has shown extraordinary forgiveness towards them and the white population generally,” Mr Chatteris said.
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South African Catholic leaders refute U.S. claims of white genocide (Crux)
