Trump video shows no “graves” in South Africa

Este Artículo Estará Disponible Español en el tiemempo Latino.

In an outstanding moment with the leader of South Africa, President Donald Trump played a video of which he said that he showed “burial sites” for a thousand white farmers – the victims of a so -called genocide – along a roadside in South Africa.

It actually showed a demonstration of 2020 that drew attention to the topic of violence against farmers of all breeds in South Africa.

Trump made his comments during an Oval Office meeting on May 21 with the South African President Cyril Ramaphosa a week after the United States had accepted the first South African refugees of the White South African refugees, which Trump described as victims of genocide. Ramaphosa has resolved against the claim that a white genocide takes place in South Africa, and in response, Trump had an employee to play a video.

Trump pointed to the screen, which showed an air absorption on a rural motorway on each side.

“I would like to know where that is because I have never seen it before,” said Ramaphosa.

“I mean it is in South Africa,” said Trump.

Instead of burial sites, as Trump claimed, the video after the murder of Glen and Vida Rafferty in August 2020 showed a demonstration that was killed in their farmhouse in Normandia during a robbery in Normandia, about 200 miles southeast of Johannesburg. The crosses along the street should remind and draw attention to the many farmers who have been killed over the years.

There is a real problem when South African farmers are killed. Although some have occupied the murders as “white genocide”, experts say that this is not exactly as we recently wrote. Rather, they said that most violent actions were committed in a country in robberies in which most of the wealth and landing after apartheid still belong to a relatively small white minority. Whites have around 72% of agricultural and agricultural stocks, although they make up about 7% of the population, as can be seen from a land examination report commissioned by the South African government from 2017.

And experts told us, although there is a high degree of murder and violence in the country, there is no evidence that white farmers are awarded. According to police data, the murders of farmers are less than 1% of all murders in South Africa. In 2022-23 there were 51 murders on farms that are not stored by breed, almost 27,500 murders in the country.

“On average in South Africa after 2023/2024, the official police statistics are murdered every day,” said Lizette Lancaster from the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa in an e -mail.

“Ready robberies and murders of farms are recognized as a serious problem by all sectors of society,” she said, but explained that “almost all South Africans from all areas of life will agree that there is no white genocide. The government has reacted to continuing claims of a white genocide and the fusion of these murder with farmers since the democracy in 1994.”

In an interview with the public broadcasting intelligence service in South Africa, Darell Brown, a farmer who was organized in the video shown by Trump during the organization of the demonstration. He explained that the crosses on the side of the road were representative of farmers who had been killed and asked the government to take the problem seriously.

The demonstration took place on Saturday, September 5, 2020, and took place on the P39 motorway between the Raffertys house and the nearby city of Newcastle.

The South African news website IOL quoted a participant in the demonstration, Bob Hoatson, and said that the initiative did not go about white farmers: “It was about people from all areas of life that were concerned about murders of farmhouses,” he said.

During the Oval Office exchange, Trump claimed: “If they kill the white farmers, nothing happens to them.”

According to Lancaster, however, it is not true that “the government is deliberately ignorant (e.g. police) or the security sector is actively involved in the crimes committed against groups in need of protection”. In South Africa, she said: “The partnerships between the government, public sector and community lead to results. The murders of the country have decreased, rural security strategies have now been available, and there is nothing special about how cruel these murders are, for example, if you look at the extent of violence in the communities in communities.”

In the case of the Rafferty murders, three men were convicted and lost time in prison.

“The lives of farmers, agricultural workers and farm residents as well as every citizen of the country, black and white, matters,” said deputy President David Mabuza to the Rafferty Morders when he called a meeting to discuss programs to contain violence against farmers. “For this reason, the government will continue to work with justice, criminal preventing and security clusters in order to ensure the prevention as a priority in dealing with agricultural murders.”

While violence in South Africa remains a serious problem, the video played by Trump did not show 1,000 “graves” or proves that there is a white genocide in the country.

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