US President Donald Trump. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The latest diplomatic row between South Africa and the United States raged on Saturday with Pretoria voicing concern over President Donald Trump’s executive order cutting aid and offering sanctuary to white South Africans in his country.
In a statement taking note of the order, the department of international relations and cooperation said it was greatly concerned that “the foundational premise of this order lacks factual accuracy and fails to recognise South Africa’s profound and painful history of colonialism and apartheid”.
“We are concerned by what seems to be a campaign of misinformation and propaganda aimed at misrepresenting our great nation. It is disappointing to observe that such narratives seem to have found favour among decision-makers in the United States of America,” it added.
In the executive order issued on Friday, Trump said South Africa’s recently signed Expropriation Act enabled the government “to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”, adding:
“This Act follows countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”
Trump also accused South Africa of “taking aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements”.
“The United States cannot support the government of South Africa’s commission of rights violations in its country or its ‘undermining United States foreign policy, which poses national security threats to our Nation, our allies, our African partners, and our interests,” he added.
The order said the US would promote the resettlement of what it called “Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation”.
On Saturday Afrikaner rights lobby group Afriforum and labour group Solidary sought to distance themselves from Trump’s executive order, and denied that they had been pushing for punitive action to be taken against South Africa, arguing that ANC policies were to blame.
They both said Afrikaners had no intention of leaving the country, despite Trump’s offer of refuge in the US.
“We want to state clearly that we were not aware that Mr Trump would issue this order,” Solidarity Movement chairperson Flip Buys told a media briefing, adding that the organisation would seek a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa to try and iron out policy differences.
“We think in South Africa we can solve these kinds of differences between South Africans … I will lead also a delegation to the United States for discussions with the White House executives later this month, in order to ask to put the situation in South Africa in context.
In its statement, the international relations department said it was ironic that the executive order made provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remained 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 pushback from Pretoria follows Ramaphosa’s defiant stance in his State of the Nation address on Thursday, where he said South Africa would not abandon policies branded as “anti-Americanism” by Trump’s administration. He spoke days after Trump announced he was suspending all donor aid to the country, in apparent response to the Expropriation Act.
“We are not daunted. We will not be deterred,” Ramaphosa said. “We are a resilient people. We will not be bullied. We will stand together as a united nation.”
Ramaphosa said in opening a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, South Africa had only fulfilled its obligations under the Genocide Convention and continued to stand in solidarity with Palestinians “who, having endured decades of illegal occupation, are now experiencing indescribable suffering”.
On Saturday, the international relations department said South Africa remained committed to finding diplomatic solutions to any misunderstandings or disputes.