Trump fast processing of white South African refugees. But not everyone wants to go

Cnn
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A group of 59 white South Africans came to the United States last week, after granting the white house the refugee status that quickly pursued the processing of African refugees, but held refugee applications for other nationalities during the break.

On Wednesday, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will meet his US counterpart Donald Trump in Washington, who is aiming for a reset in relationships with the United States. The connections between the two nations have been abused since the family of help to South Africa in February due to claims that the white population of the minority abused.

The South African government said “the refreshment of bilateral, economic and commercial relationships” is the specific focus of Ramaphosa's US visit. Ramaphosa said that the white South Africans who arrive in the United States “do not fit into the bill” in order to have the refugee status as someone who leaves out his country for fear of persecution.

But since thousands of other Africans hope for admission to the United States, others insist that they do not need refugee status, but want America's help instead a wave of violent crimes in South Africa or even establish an autonomous state within a state.

Joost Strydom leads the group of White South Africans who have rejected the USA-BOW of the United States, and Head of Orania, a separatist “only African settlement” in the north of the country.

“Help us here,” he said, his message to Trump, from whom he hopes that she will recognize Orania's striving for self -determination.

“We don't want to go here,” he said to CNN. “We don't want to be refugees in the United States.”

The 8,000 hectare (19,800 hectare) city, which are around 3,000 Africans, is partially self -managed. The only white enclave generates half of its own electricity requirement, controls local controls and prints its own currency that is held on the South African border. But the residents of the settlement want more: their recognition as an independent state.

Strydom was part of the Orania delegation to the USA at the end of March to strive for this goal.

“We met with government officials,” he said. “The conversation has not yet been completed and we have decided to hold back.”

Orania is supported by an after-apartheid agreement in 1994, which enabled the self-determination of the African self-determination, including the concept of an African state, which is referred to as the people.

Strydom assumes that the settlement could develop into a “national house for the African”.

Africans are the descendants of predominantly Dutch settlers in South Africa. From 2022, the White South Africans will make up around 7% of the country's population – a share that had decreased from 11% in 1996, such as census data. A discriminatory apartheid government, led by Africans who lost power in the mid-nineties, was replaced by a multi-party democracy dominated by the African National Congress.

According to the South African Chamber of Commerce in the USA (Saccusa), at least 67,000 South Africans have shown interest in looking for refugee status in the United States.

In comments that have been decided to withdraw Africans in the United States, Trump quoted the claim that in South Africa “a genocide takes place”, and added that “white farmers are brutally killed and confiscated their country”.

The South African authorities have strongly rejected such claims. In a statement in February, the South African police service said that “only a farmer is by chance” between October 1 and December 31, and asked the public to “distinguish from assumptions that are part of the past where agricultural murders are the same as murdering in white farmers”.

Police Minister Senzo Mchunu recently emphasized in a statement that there is no evidence of a “white genocide” in the country.

The police crime number for the last quarter of 2024 was contested by an African interest representation, Afriforum, which argued that five agricultural owners were murdered in these months and that the police had subjected the actual figures.

Afriforum has been documenting agricultural murders in South Africa in South Africa for years. In his report for 2023 there were at least 77 agricultural attacks and nine murders in the first quarter of this year, almost 80 attacks and 11 murders, which she caught within the same time in 2022.

Most attacks occurred in the Gauteng province, the group said. Gauteng is home to the greatest concentration of the white population of South Africa, according to the country's last census in 2022, with around 1.5 million white living there.

African Bauer Adriaan Vos is recently a victim of Gauteng's farm attacks. The 55-year-old said he fought for his life two months ago after being shot on his farm in Glenharvie, a municipality in Westonaria, west of Gauteng.

“I was shot in my knee twice and once on my back,” said Vos in the early morning hours of March 16 about the attack on his farm.

“Fortunately, this ball stuck next to my lung,” he said, adding that his farmhouse looted and set on fire that night.

VOS could not identify his attackers and is not sure whether the attack was racist. But the robbery seems to be part of a pattern of agricultural attacks that has been in South Africa for years, a country that deals with one of the highest moral rates in the world. The South African authorities rarely publish crime figures according to breed, but local media report that most murder victims are black.

The police in Westonaria said CNN that the attack on the farm from VOS 'did not have any known suspects and have no evidence of who the attackers were.

The South African leader Ramaphosa does not believe that Africans are persecuted – as from Trump and his Ally Elon Musk, who was born and grew up in the country – and has described those who fled to the United States as “cowards” that are rejected against the efforts of its government, the legacy of apartheid, especially inequality.

One of these efforts was the controversial decree in January of an expropriation law that enables the government of South Africa to take over and redistribute it – without obligation to pay compensation in some cases – if the attack is determined as “just and fair and fair”.

Under the apartheid, black South Africans were violently expropriated by their country for the benefit of the whites. Today, about three decades after the official termination of the racial regulation in the country, the blacks, over 80% of the country's population, have around 4% of the private country, while 72% are kept by whites.

Who are the Africans who stay behind and what do they want?

For some Africans in Orania, there is more to lose than to win if they choose refugees in the United States.

Orania was built by Strydom as an “abandoned ghost town” with extreme weather. He has seen infrastructural growth and, according to Cara Tomlinson, who coordinates an African culture association, is the most realistic place to preserve African culture and inheritance.

“If I went to America, I would have to give up my language and culture for the American language and culture. I would give up my god-given identity as African for something strange,” the 24-year-old Tomlinson told CNN.

Leaving Orania for the USA is neither for the 70-year-old retired church minister Sarel Roets, who moved to the city in 2019. Orania offers him “a quiet, lonely life,” he told CNN.

“When we travel outside of Orania in South Africa, it is very common to be viewed with hatred,” he added.

Both Roets and Tomlinson want Trump's recognition for Orania, but the legitimacy of the separatist city was questioned by other South Africans, including members of the radical left -wing party, the economic freedom fighter (Eff), who say that their “only African -only” policy “exclusion of exclusion” institutionalized.

The South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Orania had no status as a nation within a nation and was bound to South African laws.

Beyond Orania, other Africans such as VOS who still maintain his injuries are planning not to go despite the pressure from farmers.

“I am lucky enough to be alive,” he said, adding: “I have to take care of this place (his arable land), whatever left. We were born and grew up here. South Africa is everything we know.”

But the help has to come quickly, warned Vos when he surrounded what he hoped that Ramaphosa would tell his number opposite us during his visit to the White House.

“We need help in South Africa because you don't know if you wake up tomorrow. It's a chaos here,” he said.

“Hopefully he (Ramaphosa) can be open about everything (with Trump) … and says:” I will repair it and I will take care of the farmers and people who put food in their mouth. “He has to come and do it, implement it and start over.”