JOHANNESBURG, 1 November (H.S.): The South African government has sharply criticized the Trump administration's decision to prioritize white Afrikaners for refugee status, dismissing claims of a white genocide as baseless and highlighting that many within the Afrikaner community themselves reject the narrative.

The rebuke comes after the US announced on Thursday that it was slashing its annual refugee cap for fiscal year 2026 to a record low of 7,500, with the vast majority of those slots allocated to white South Africans.

Washington has justified the policy by claiming that Afrikaners—descendants of Dutch and French settlers—face systemic discrimination, land seizures, and racially motivated violence under South Africa's Black-led government.

Pretoria has called these allegations completely false, pointing out that official crime statistics do not support the claim that white people are disproportionately victims of violent crime.

The government also noted that an open letter from prominent Afrikaners published earlier this week repudiated the idea of persecution, with some signatories labeling the US relocation scheme as racist.The controversy has been escalating for months. Earlier this year, President Trump offered refugee status to Afrikaners following the passage of a South African law allowing for land expropriation without compensation in certain cases—a measure aimed at redressing historical imbalances where most private farmland remains in the hands of the white minority.

The issue came to a head during a tense Oval Office meeting in May, where Trump confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with what he claimed was evidence of murdered white farmers. The images and videos presented by Trump were later widely discredited; one photo of body bags was identified by Reuters as having been taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo, not South Africa.The US program, officially known as Mission South Africa, was launched in February 2025 to fast-track asylum for white South Africans.

To date, a small number of Afrikaners have been resettled under the program, but the South African government insists they do not meet the legal threshold for refugee status under international law.

The dispute has severely strained diplomatic relations, leading to the expulsion of South Africa's ambassador to Washington earlier this year after he accused Trump of mobilising a supremacism.

---------------

Hindusthan Samachar / Jun Sarkar