Trump accelerated the treatment of white South African refugees. But not everyone wants to leave

Cnn
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A group of 59 white South Africans arrived in the United States last week after obtaining refugee status by the White House, which accelerated the treatment of Afrikaner refugees but took a break for refugees for other nationalities.

On Wednesday, South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa is expected to meet his American counterpart Donald Trump in Washington, looking for reset in relations with the United States. The links between the two nations were charged since Trump froze help from South Africa in February to affirm that it mistreated its minority white population.

The South African government said that “the cropping of bilateral, economic and commercial relations” was the specific objective of the American visit of Ramaphosa. Ramaphosa said that white South Africans arriving in the United States “do not correspond to the bill” to have refugee status as a person who leaves his country for fear of persecution.

But as thousands of other Afrikaners hope for admission to the United States, others insist that they do not need refugee status but want American aid to attack a wave of violent crimes in South Africa, or even to establish an autonomous state within a state.

Joost Strydom directs the group of white South Africans who rejected the United States asylum offer, and directs Orania, a separatist colony “Afrikaner only” in the Cap du Nord de Pays.

“Help us here,” he said, his message was to Trump, that he hopes to recognize the quest for self-determination of Orania.

“We don’t want to leave here,” he told CNN. “We don’t want to be refugees in the United States.”

Housing some 3,000 Afrikaners, the city of Orania of 8,000 hectares (19,800 acres) is partially autonomous. The exclusively white enclave produces half of its own electricity needs, takes local taxes and prints its own currency which has been set at the South African rand. But residents of the colony want more: its recognition as an independent state.

Strydom was part of the Orania delegation in the United States at the end of March to put pressure on this goal.

“We have met government representatives,” he said. “The conversation is in progress, and that’s something we have decided to keep a low profile.”

Orania is supported by a post-Apartheid agreement from 1994 which allowed Afrikaner self-determination, including the concept of an Afrikaner state, called Volkstaat.

Strydom plans that the colony could become a “national home for the Afrikaner people”.

Afrikaners are the descendants of Dutch predominantly settlers in South Africa, white South Africans representing approximately 7% of the country’s population in 2022 – a share that had been 11% in 1996, according to census data. A discriminatory apartheid government led by Afrikaners lost power in the mid -1990s, replaced by a multipartite democracy dominated by the African National Congress.

According to the South African Chamber of Commerce in the United States, at least 67,000 South Africans have expressed interest in looking for refugee status in the United States.

In the comments justifying his decision to reinstall Afrikaners in the United States, Trump cited the statements according to which “a genocide takes place” in South Africa, adding that “white farmers are brutally killed and that their land has been confiscated”.

South African authorities have denyed such claims strongly. In a statement in February, the South African police service said that “a single farmer, who happens to be white”, had been killed between October 1 and December 31, and urged the public “to abstain from the hypotheses that belong to the past, where agricultural murders are the same as the murders of white farmers”.

Police Minister Senzo Mchunu, said in a recent statement that there was no evidence of a “white genocide” in the country.

The figure of police crime for the last quarter of 2024 had been challenged by an Afrikaner defense group, Afriforum, which argued that five agricultural owners had been murdered during these months and that the police had underestimated the real figures.

Afriforum has been documenting agricultural murders in South Africa for years. In his report for 2023, he declared that there were at least 77 agricultural attacks and nine murders in the first quarter of this year, which almost equaled the 80 attacks and 11 murders he recorded during the same period in 2022. CNN could not independently verify these figures – the government affirms that around 20,000 people are murdered each year.

Most of the attacks have taken place in the province of Gauteng, the group said. Gauteng is home to the largest concentration of the white population of South Africa, according to the country’s last census in 2022, with around 1.5 million whites lived there.

Farmer Afrikaner Adriaan Vos is recently a victim of agricultural attacks in Gauteng. The 55 -year -old said that he had been left in combat for his life only two months ago after being killed on his farm in Glenharvie, a canton of Westonaria, west of Gauteng.

“I was shot dead twice and once behind my back,” said your attack on his farm in the early hours of March 16.

“Fortunately, this ball stayed next to my lung,” he said, adding that his farm was pillaged and burnt down the same night.

Your could not identify its attackers and is not sure whether the attack was motivated racial. But the raid seems to be part of a model of agricultural attacks that persist for years in South Africa, a country struggling with one of the highest murder in the world. The South African authorities rarely publish personalities of crime by race, but the local media report that most victims of murders are black.

Westonaria police told CNN that there were “no known suspects” in the attack on the farm of VOS and “no index of whom the attackers were”.

South African leader Ramaphosa does not think that Afrikaners are persecuted – as Trump and his ally Elon Musk claims, who was born and raised in the country – and described those who were fleeing in the United States as “cowards” which are opposed to the efforts of his government to unload the heritage of apartheid, in particular inequality.

One of these efforts was the controversial promulgation in January of an expropriation law, which allows the Government of South Africa to take land and redistribute it – without obligation to pay compensation in certain cases – if the seizure is deemed “fair and fair and in the public interest”.

Under apartheid, black South Africans were forcibly dispossessed of their land for the benefit of whites. Today, about three decades after racial segregation has officially ended in the country, blacks, which represent more than 80% of the population of 63 million inhabitants in the country, hold approximately 4% of private land while 72% are held by whites.

Who are the Afrikaners who stay behind and what do they want?

For some Afrikaners in Orania, there is more to lose than to win if they choose to be refugees in the United States.

Built from zero on arid lands described by Strydom as “an abandoned ghost city” with extreme weather conditions, Orania has experienced infrastructure growth and is the most realistic place to preserve Afrikaner culture and heritage, according to Cara Tomlinson which coordinates an Afrikaner cultural association.

“If I had to go to America, I should abandon my language and my culture for the American language and culture. I would abandon my identity given by God as a foreign thing,” Tomlinson, 24, told CNN.

Leaving Orania for the United States is not on the cards for the 70-year-old retirement minister, Sarel Roets, who moved to town in 2019. Orania provides him with “a calm and lonely life,” he told CNN.

“When we travel outside of Orania in South Africa, it is very common to be looked at with hatred,” he added.

The Roets and Tomlinson wish the recognition of Trump for Orania, but the legitimacy of the separatist city has been questioned by other South Africans, including members of the Radical Left Party, the fighters of economic freedom (EFF) who say that its “only Afrikan” policy “institutionalizes exclusion”.

The South South Foreign Affairs Ministry said Orania had no nation status within a nation and has remained linked by South African laws.

Beyond Orania, other Afrikaners, such as your, who still treats her injuries, do not plan to leave despite the pressures felt by the farmers.

“I am fortunate to be alive,” he said, adding: “I have to take care of this place (its agricultural land), everything that remains. We were born and raised here. South Africa is all we know.”

But the help must come quickly, warned your, when he described what he hoped that Ramaphosa will say his opposite number during his visit to the White House.

“We need help in South Africa because you don’t know if you are going to wake up tomorrow. It’s a mess here,” he said.

“I hope he (Ramaphosa) can be open to everything (with Trump) … and say:” I’m going to fix it, and I’m going to take care of the farmers and people who put food in my mouth. “He must come and do it, implement it and start again.”