JOHANNESBURG: South Africa\u2019s top law enforcement official said Friday that US President Donald Trump wrongly claimed that a video he showed in the Oval Office was of burial sites for more than 1,000 white farmers and he \u201ctwisted\u201d the facts to push a false narrative about mass killings of white people in his country.
\nPolice Minister Senzo Mchunu was talking about a video clip that was played during the meeting between Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday that showed an aerial view of a rural road with lines of white crosses erected on either side.
\n\u201cNow this is very bad,\u201d Trump said as he referred to the clip that was part of a longer video that was played in the meeting. \u201cThese are burial sites, right here. Burial sites, over a thousand, of white farmers, and those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mchunu said the crosses did not mark graves or burial sites, but were a temporary memorial put up in 2020 to protest the killings of all farmers across South Africa. They were put up during a funeral procession for a white couple who were killed in a robbery on their farm, Mchunu said.
\nA son of the couple who were killed and a local community member who took part in the procession also said the crosses do not represent burial sites and were taken down after the protest.
\nSouth Africa struggles with extremely high levels of violent crime, although farm killings make up a small percentage of the country\u2019s overall homicides. Both white and Black farmers are attacked, and sometimes killed, and the government has condemned the violence against both groups.
\nWhites make up around 7 percent of South Africa\u2019s 62 million people but generally still have a much better standard of living than the Black majority more than 30 years after the end of the apartheid system of racial segregation. Whites make up the majority of the country\u2019s wealthier commercial farmers.
\nMchunu said Trump\u2019s false claims that the crosses represented more than 1,000 burial sites was part of his \u201cgenocide story\u201d \u2014 referring to the US president\u2019s baseless allegations in recent weeks that there is a widespread campaign in South Africa to kill white farmers and take their land that he has said amounts to a genocide.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are not graves. They don\u2019t represent graves,\u201d Mchunu said regarding the video that has become prominent on social media since it was shown in the White House. \u201cAnd it was unfortunate that those facts got twisted to fit a false narrative about crime in South Africa.\u201d
\n\u201cWe have respect for the president of the United States,\u201d Mchunu added. \u201cBut we have no respect for his genocide story whatsoever.\u201d
\nThe White House, when asked about Mchunu\u2019s remarks, pointed back to press secretary Karoline Leavitt\u2019s comments a day earlier at her briefing, when she said that \u201cthe video showed crosses that represent the dead bodies of people who were racially persecuted by their government.\u201d
\nOf the more than 5,700 homicides in South Africa from January through March, six occurred on farms and, of those, one victim was white, said Mchunu. \u201cIn principle, we do not categorize people by race, but in the context of claims of genocide of white people, we need to unpack the killings in this category,\u201d he said.
\nLourens Bosman, who is a former lawmaker in the national Parliament, said he took part in the procession shown in the video the Trump administration played. It happened near the town of Newcastle in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal in September 2020. The crosses were symbols to white and Black farmers and farmworkers who had been killed across South Africa over the previous 26 years, Bosman said.
\nTrump\u2019s falsehoods that South Africa\u2019s government is fueling the persecution and killing of its minority white farmers has been strongly denied by the country, which says the allegations are rooted in misinformation.
\nRamaphosa pushed for this week\u2019s meeting with Trump in what he said was an attempt to change Trump\u2019s mind over South Africa and correct misconceptions about the country to rebuild ties.
\nTrump issued an executive order on Feb. 7 that cut all US financial assistance to South Africa and accused it of mistreating white Afrikaner farmers and seizing their land. The order accused Ramaphosa\u2019s government of \u201cfueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.\u201d
\nTrump\u2019s executive order also accused South Africa of pursuing an anti-American foreign policy and specifically criticized its decision to launch a case at the International Court of Justice accusing US ally Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The order accused South Africa of supporting the Palestinian militant group Hamas through that case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
JOHANNESBURG: South Africa\u2019s top law enforcement official said Friday that US President Donald Trump wrongly claimed that a video he showed in the Oval Office was of burial sites for more than 1,000 white farmers and he \u201ctwisted\u201d the facts to push a false narrative about mass killings of white people in his country. Police …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":81524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81506"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81525,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81506\/revisions\/81525"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}