South Africa’s Leader Criticizes Afrikaners Seeking Refuge in U.S.

President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said that the White South Africans who had gone to the United States after the refugee status that were “cowardly” were granted, on a blunt broader as tensions about the problem between countries.

“They are fleeing” from a duty to help with the transformation of South Africa and solve their problems, Mr. Ramaphosa told reporters on Tuesday, he added: “When you run away, you are a coward.”

More than 8,000 South Africans have expressed interest in the American program to create an accelerated path so that Afrikaners are resettle in the United States. That comes when the Trump administration has banned most of the refugees in another country.

If they are approved, they would join the dishes of people who arrived on Monday on the outskirts of Washington on a charter flight founded by the United States.

The Afrikaners program has gone to the heart of the dynamics of the Apartheid race in South Africa. The country’s government has strongly rejected the Trump administration statement that Afrikaners, members of a white ethnic minority who ruled apartheid at the door in South Africa, should be eligible for refugee status.

The Afrikaners “do not conform to the definition of a refugee,” Ramaphosa said Monday at a forum in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

He said that a refugee is “someone who has to leave his country for fear of political persecution, religious persecution,” and said strongly that he does not describe the experience of whites in South Africa.

Trump has long repeated the conspiracy theories about the abuse of White South Africans in the three decades after the end of apartheid.

In 2018, he said that his Secretary of State will analyze “the large -scale murder of the farmers”, and repeated the claim in his second term, saying that the white farmers were “being brutally murdered.”

Elon Musk, the billionaire that is from South Africa and has become a nearby advisor to Mr. Trump, shared similar right -right conspiracy in 2023 in X: “They are openly pressing for the genocide of the whites in South Africa.”

The official figures and the largest group of farmers in the country said statement: they show that the data of the South African police, of the 225 people reported by the farms, from April 2020 to March 2024, only 53 were farmers, which are White Usuaxy. Around 100 were workers, which are mostly black.

In February, Trump signed an executive order that suspended all foreign aid to South Africa, claiming that the white landowners were mistreated.

At the same time, its administration has made it almost impossible for other people, including those of the country devastated by the war or affected by famine in the United States. That includes Afghans who helped the United States fight against Taliban and Congolese conflicts that had already been examined and authorized to travel before Trump taught a position.

But the Trump administration applied the afrikaners request in just three months, an extremely fast change for a process that often has been for years.

The movement for Grant Afrikaners The refugee status has only aggravated relations between the two nations.

South African officials have given the measure as a political attempt motivated to discredit the country. The Trump administration has criticized the South African government for having a close relationship with Iran and for its position against Israel.