Facts examination of Trump's white farmers “genocide” in South Africa

This article originally appeared on Politifact.

President Donald Trump recently allowed 59 white African farmers to step down as refugees in the United States.

Read more: Trump suspended the refugee program. Why does he invite white South Africans to find a new home in the USA?

When a reporter asked on May 12, why he created an accelerated path for Africans, Trump said: “Because they are killed. And we don't want people to be killed. But it is a genocide that they don't want to write about.”

Trump added: “White farmers are brutally killed and their country is confiscated in South Africa.”

Trump has shared versions of this story since 2018, as did others in his orbit, including Elon Musk, a Trump consultant from South Africa.

Trump's decision on the resumption of Africans was a reversal; After taking office, he suspended all US refugee recordings.

The South African government criticized Trump's execution command of February 7 to enable the Africans in the United States' resettlement

“It is ironic that the executive regulation in the United States provides for a group of refugees in the United States for a group in South Africa, which is the most economical privileged, while people in need of protection are deported from other parts of the world and, despite real difficulties, asylum,” says the explanation.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is scheduled to visit the White House on May 21.

White farmers were murdered in South Africa. However, these murders make up less than 1% of the more than 27,000 annual murders across the country. Experts said the deaths did not mean genocide, and Trump mislead the land confiscation.

“The idea of ​​a white genocide in South Africa is completely wrong”

Gareth Newham, who heads a program for justice and violence prevention at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa.

“As an independent institute that pursues violence and violent crimes in South Africa, we would be among the first to deliver the first to trigger the alarm and provide evidence of the world to the first (the first) and the evidence of the world.”

There are around 2.7 million white Africans in South Africa who are descendants of Dutch and French settlers. About 80% of the people living in South Africa are black. From 1948 to the early nineties, South Africa lived under the apartheid rule, the racial regulation, which only forced white people and forced black South Africans separately from white people.

South African crime data and its limits

In response to our e -mail to seek statements for trumps, the White House provided no data. A spokesman said that Africans had told the US officials of violent attacks, murder threats, vandalism and racist states against the farmers.

Newham said the main motif for almost all farm attacks was robbery that has been documented for a long time.

“Attacks in which there are indications of racist or political motives (i.e. slogans that were written on a scene of a crime on the wall, or the words that the attacker spoke according to the victim) are extremely rare and only make up a few percent of the recorded cases,” said Newham.

The majority of the murderous victims are poor nationwide, sub- or unemployed young black men, said Newham.

REGARD: White South Africans arrive in the USA after receiving refugee status from Trump

“The victimization of murder is far more correlated with classes, gender and location as a breed,” said Newham. About half of the murders take place in about 12% of the districts, “mainly townships or poor areas in metropolitan cities, which are mainly populated by black Africans”.

The crime report of the South African police service for the period from April 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023 shows that there were 51 murders on farms nationwide at farms. However, the data has restrictions.

The breed of the murder victims of Farmmord is not consistently recorded in official data, said Anthony Kaziboni, senior researcher at the Center for Social Development of the University of Johannesburg in Africa.

While anecdotal evidence indicates that many victims are white, other victims are black or not white, said Kaziboni. “Media reports sometimes mention the breed, but these are sporadic and not methodologically robust enough to support allegations about systemic racist targeting.”

Nechama Brodie, a journalist who wrote a book about murders in farms and actually checked the topic, said Politifact that South African police services were not always effective when creating a murder for agricultural ways. A challenge is to decide who is counted as a farmer because there are commercial farms and “small farmers” that can simply be land.

Brodie said Afriforum, a non-state organization that focuses on Africans, was one of the more reliable sources of information about murders of white Africa-speaking farmers. Afriforum data based on information from police, private security services, victims and media reports showed about 50 murders in Farm each year.

Brodie said that the death of a white farm owner is treated more in the news than the murder of a rural small farmer. The majority of the small farmers and rural residents of the country are black.

“Reporting about the South African media about murder victims is extremely selective and creates the wrong representation of who is most at risk,” said Brodie.

No evidence that South Africa sponsored or organized murders to destroy a group

We asked the Foreign Ministry for evidence of a genocide of white farmers in South Africa, and a spokesman said that the department has not known anything about the determination of the genocide.

The official definition of genocide, which was written in 1948 according to the negotiations cited by the United Nations, kills, causes physical damage, prevents births or the transfer of children, “with the intention of destroying a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”.

The definition does not contain any instructions for absolute numbers or percentages that are required to qualify as a genocide.

There are many arguments about the definition of genocide, said Richard Breitman, an emeritus professor from the American university and author of Books over the Holocaust.

“But many specialists consider the intention of destroying a whole ethnic, religious or national group as essential,” said Breitman. “It is not exclusively a question of the number of victims, but of organized efforts, normally from a government or a political organization, a major percentage of a defined enemy group.”

Read more: Persecution of the white South Africa is a “wrong story”, says President, when Muschus repeats the genocide behavior

Experts rejected the “genocide” characterization of Africans.

“There is no indication of a state -funded campaign or an intention to eliminate a certain group of races,” said Kazoni. “The main motive remains robbery, sometimes associated with extreme violence, which corresponds to wider patterns of violent crimes in South Africa.”

The term genocide causes the horrors of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed, and the 1994 genocide, where 800,000 Tutsis were systematically killed, said Kaziboni.

“Against this background and the legal definition of the United Nations, it is both inaccurate and misleading,” said Kaziboni. “This does not reduce the severity of violence or the need for increased rural security, but it underlines how important it is to react with evidence, nuances and context.”

Jean-Yves Camus, co-director at the observatory of political radicalism at the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, said the topic “must be seen in the broader context of a country plagued by crime and gang activity”.

In most cases, a new land law requires payment to owners

While apartheid does not lose white families their houses and land. When apartheid ended in the mid -nineties, the government passed laws to help black South Africans recover from decades of discrimination and abuse.

In January, Ramaphosa signed a legislative template in which the government created the procedures for a public purpose. The invoice calls for landowners with some exceptions, e.g. B. if the country is not used, or the main purpose of the owner is not to develop the country.

The circumstances in which the payment is not necessary are “very limited”, wrote Zsa-Zsa Temmers Boggenpoel, a professor at the University of Jelly, who keeps property rights.

“In the colonial and apartheid past of South Africa, the land distribution due to the breed was very uneven,” wrote Boggenpoel. “The country is still suffering from the effects. Therefore, the expropriation of property has been a potential instrument to reduce landing inequality. This has become an increasing urgency. The South Africans have expressed impatience with the slow pace of the land reform.”

The main goal of the new law is to enable the government to legally abandoned or unexpectedly expansed – like hundreds of buildings in Johannesburg, which were left by their owners and adopted by slumlords and people who are involved in organized crime, said Newham.

Experts told us that no land attacks have yet taken place.

“There is no evidence of a systematic land confiscation that aims at white farmers or other people,” said Kaziboni.