South African President Cyril Ramaphosa came to Washington, D.C. hoping to ease growing tensions between his country and the U.S. Instead, he was ambushed by President Donald Trump, leaving the fate of the relationship between the nations up in the air.
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The bulk of disagreements between the two leaders came down to Trump claiming Ramaphosa isn’t doing enough to resolve the alleged “white genocide” happening in the African nation. But here’s the thing... According to experts and political leaders, there is no white genocide occurring in South Africa. But in true Trump fashion, that fact didn’t stop him from bringing alleged receipts to fit his agenda.
The Oval Office meeting comes just over one week after Trump welcomed 59 white South Africans, better known as Afrikaners, into the U.S. with refugee status, we previously reported. According to him, these alleged refugees were targeted in South Africa because of their race, and they needed America to rescue them. Never mind the history of Afrikaners brutalizing native South Africans for generations or the ongoing immigration crisis plaguing America today.
When Ramaphosa sat down for a media blitz orchestrated by the administration, he was met with Trump, who came with dozens of documents and even a video to prove his false theory. “This is sort of the opposite of apartheid,” Trump said of the alleged white genocide. “What’s happening now is never reported. Nobody knows about it.”
Maybe Trump was hoping to relive his heated interaction with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine earlier this year. Instead, Ramaphosa kept his cool, responding to Trump’s continuous claims saying, “There is criminality in our country. People who do get killed, unfortunately, through criminal activity are not only white people, majority of them are Black people.”
The South African government first criticized Trump in February after the president’s executive order allowing Afrikaner resettlement in the U.S. “It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship,” the South African government’s statement said according to PBS.
During the meeting between leaders, Trump even played a short video, telling someone to “turn off the lights,” so he could get a better picture. “They’re all White farmers. The family of White farmers,” Trump said of the alleged victims shown in the video. “It’s a terrible sight. I’ve never seen anything like it. On both sides of the road, you have crosses. Those people are all killed.”
Experts acknowledged white farmers have been murdered in South Africa, but those murders only account for less than one percent of the total 27,000 annual killings nationwide. “The idea of a ‘white genocide’ taking place in South Africa is completely false,” said Gareth Newham, head of a justice and violence prevention program at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa.
Ramaphosa wasn’t wavered by Trump’s accusations against him and his country. Instead, the South African leader continuously shifted the conversation back to economic and trade relations. Still addressing Trump’s concerns, Ramaphosa did ask the president what he wants the South African government to do about the false genocide. That’s when Trump responded saying, “I don’t know.”
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