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2025-05-24 Africa Subsaharan
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Biden-era reports, genocide group confirm Trump's human rights fears for South African farmers
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[JustTheNews] Trump's video evidence of hate directed at Afrikaners met with quibbles about what genocide means.
The tit-for-tat battle the news media has waged against President Donald Trump over his administration's South African refugee policy is masking a harsh reality: that the country's farmers do in fact face a crisis of violence.
Even Biden-era government reports and genocide watch group have raised flags, mostly being ignored until now. The only question is whether race or greed is the motive for the crimes.
“We have many people that feel they’re being persecuted, and they’re coming to the United States,” Trump said in the Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday. “People are fleeing South Africa for their own safety. Their land is being confiscated, and in many cases, they’re being killed.”
The problems that President Trump identified in his meeting with the South African president, from rural violence that affects white South Africans—known as Afrikaners or Boers—to a legal regime promoting race-based property seizures, are certainly real—but debate rages about whether it rises to the level of “genocide.”
A BACKGROUND OF VIOLENCE
A Biden-era State Department report on human rights conditions in South Africa cited data from a “civil society organization” that in 2021 and 2022 there were 748 total farm attacks and more than 100 killings targeting white South Africans. The report noted, however, though some advocacy groups asserted that white farmers were targeted for burglaries, home invasions, and killings because of their race, it is unclear whether the attacks are actually just part of South Africa’s exorbitant crime rate.
The country is the most violent in Africa, boasting the world’s third-highest murder rate (according to 2023 data), leading many observers to suggest that the violence experienced by white South African farmers does not meet the traditional definitions of a genocide.
Adding to defining the problem as everyday murder, “South Africa has one of the highest crime rates in the world. Its murder rate of 34 per 100,000 population, tenth in the world, is exceeded only by the narco-states of Central and South America. It has, by far, the highest murder rate in Africa,” Genocide Watch, a Washington-based organization founded by former State Department employee Gregory Stanton, wrote in a country report.
“If the state's first duty is to provide personal security to its people, South Africa is a failed state,” the group wrote.
Genocide Watch specifically cites a failure to prosecute murderers who targeted white farmers, which it says contributes to a culture of impunity as the general murder rate remains high.
President Trump on Wednesday suggested the attacks were part of a “genocide” specifically targeting white South Africans, specifically forcing the unsuspecting South African president to watch videos showing calls from radical communist politician Julius Malema to “Shoot the Boers.” Malema was previously convicted under the country’s hate speech laws in 2011 for singing a song by that title, popularized deputy minister in Nelson Mandela’s government in the 1990s.
Genocide Watch agrees that Malema and his Marxist Economic Freedom Front party “encourages these murders, which are meant to terrorize farmers into emigrating from South Africa” and noted “White farmers are defenseless because South Africa outlawed private gun possession and disbanded the mutual protection cooperatives.”
Though Afrikaners make up roughly 8% of the population, they are the victims of only 2% of murders, veteran South Africa reporter Geof Hill reported in 2023. And, the problem may be even worse in urban areas—four of South Africa’s cities of over 300,000 people are among the world’s 50 most dangerous cities.
LEGACY MEDIA CALLS THE RAMPAGE "INACCURATE"
Trump's opponents largely reacted by challenging the existence of the attacks despite the videos. Instead, the headlines blared that South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was "ambushed" by Trump's video exposition, and then turned to denying the underlying facts that Trump's videos presented.
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Posted by Skidmark 2025-05-24 00:00||
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