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The South African government has criticised the US’s decision to prioritise refugee applications from white Afrikaners, saying claims of a white genocide have been widely discredited and lack reliable evidence.<\/p>\n
It highlighted an open letter published by prominent members of the Afrikaner community earlier this week rejecting the narrative, with some signatories calling the relocation scheme racist.<\/p>\n
The limited number of white South African Afrikaners signing up to relocate to the US was indication that they were not being persecuted, it added.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, the administration of US President Donald Trump announced its lowest refugee annual cap on record to just 7,500.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The exact figures of the number of white South Africans who have been admitted through the US scheme are not available. <\/p>\n South Africa’s latest crime statistics do not indicate that more white people have fallen victim to violent crime than other racial groups. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n Most private farmland is owned by white South Africans who make up just over 7% of the population.<\/p>\n Several months ago, South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, was expelled<\/a> after accusing Trump of “mobilising a supremacism” and trying to “project white victimhood as a dog whistle”.<\/p>\n In the Oval Office in May, Trump confronted South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and claimed white farmers in his nation were being killed and “persecuted”.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Washington did not comment on the claim that they had misidentified the image.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Additional reporting by Natasha Booty<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n