 "Cyril Ramaphosa at the Union Buildings in Tshwane, South Africa. AP file")
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has called all of the white Afrikaners who have relocated to the US as refugees “cowards” and has claimed that “they will be back soon”.
A group of 59 white South Africans arrived in the US yesterday for resettlement after President Donald Trump granted them refugee status as victims of what he called a “genocide."
Ramaphosa, meanwhile, said that the ones who left were disappointed at the country’s efforts to address the inequities of the apartheid past and dubbed their relocation a “sad moment for them”.
“As South Africans, we are resilient. We don’t run away from our problems. We must stay here and solve our problems. When you run away you are a coward, and that’s a real cowardly act,” he said.
Trump essentially halted refugee arrivals after taking office, but is making an exception for the Afrikaners despite Pretoria’s insistence that they do not face persecution in their homeland.
Both the president and his ally, Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, said white farmers were being killed in the country and repeated an allegation of “genocide” that has been widely dismissed as absurd.
On the other hand, more than 30 years after the rule of white minorities ended in South Africa, black farmers still own only a fraction of the country’s most productive lands, with the majority in the hands of white farmers.
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More Shorts“If you look at all national groups in our country, black and white, they’ve stayed in this country because it’s our country and we must not run away from our problems. We must stay here and solve our problems,” Ramaphosa said.
“I can bet you that they will be back soon because there is no country like South Africa,” he added.
Under eligibility guidelines published by the US Embassy, applicants for US resettlement must either be of Afrikaner ethnicity or belong to a racial minority in South Africa.
They must also “be able to articulate a past experience of persecution or fear of future persecution.”
With inputs from agencies