Donald Trump wrongly claimed that Australia is being ‘flooded’ with white South Africans who have fled their farms and repeats an unfounded conspiracy theory that white people in South Africa are systematically killed and expropriate their country.
The American president held a chaotic encounter with the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, in the Oval Office of the White House, in which he played a video that he falsely claimed that “genocide” was committed against white people in South Africa, under what he described as “the opposite of aparthy”.
Trump has long maintained Afrikaners, a minority that mainly descended from Dutch settlers who ruled South Africa during his decades of racial apartheid, will be prosecuted. South Africa rejects the statement. Murder and violent crime figures are high in the country, but the vast majority of the victims are black.
But Trump told Ramaphosa that white farmers were fleeing for South Africa for the US and Australia.
“You take the country of people and those people are executed in many cases,” he said.
“They are executed. And they happen to be white, and most of them happen to be farmers.
“We have thousands of people who want to enter our country. They also go to Australia in smaller numbers.”
Trump later said that a large number of white South African farmers fled to Australia.
“You look at Australia – they are flooded and we are flooded with people who want to get out, and their farm is worthless.”
The Guardian has asked the Ministry of the Interior of Ausgtralia.
The former Minister of the Interior Peter Dutton – who as an opposition leader lost his seat in this month’s federal elections – presented a special humanitarian intake of white South African farmers in 2018.
The special program would be modeled in the 12,000 extra places for Syrian and Iraqi refugees that are displaced by the Syrian Civil War and the conflict against Daesh.
Dutton said in 2018 that white South African farmers “deserve special attention” and “need help from a civilized country like ours”.
“I asked the department to look at ways in which we can offer some help. We can offer more visas for people who may be in the humanitarian program.”
The South African government said at the time “that threat does not exist” and the Interior Department has not implemented a special program for white South Africans.
South Africa is not in the top 10 of countries of origin for humanitarian participants in Australia. Conducted countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Myanmar, dominate that list.
The South African population of Australia (not limited to humanitarian or refugeecomers) is the seventh largest migrant community in Australia. It represents approximately 2.6% of the overseas population of Australia and 0.8% of the total population of Australia.
This year, the US started the resettlement of white South Africans as refugees, where Trump said that Afrikaners were the victim of “genocide”. Fifty Afrikaners arrived in the US this month to take on Trump’s offer over ‘refuge’. He offered them asylum, even though the US had stopped the arrivals of asylum seekers from most of the rest of the world because he dramatically limits immigration.
The US Senator Chris van Hollen accused the Trump government of “making a spot” of the country’s refugee process, making it a system of “worldwide apartheid” by granting asylum status to Afrikaners while refugees from war-torn countries, including Sudan.
On Wednesday the American time, in the Oval Office, Ramaphosa pushed back against Trump’s statements and acknowledged the high crime percentage of South Africa, but emphasizes that most victims are black.
As the meeting became more chaotic and the tone of Trump was more noisy, Ramaphosa was resolutely calm.
“We learned by Nelson Mandela that when there are problems, people have to sit around the table and talk about it,” he said. “And this is exactly what we would like to talk about.”
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