Dozens of white South Africans have arrived in the US after the Trump administration granted them refugee status in the country, having deemed them victims of racial discrimination.
The first 59 Afrikaners were greeted by Christopher Landau, the US deputy secretary of state, at Washington’s Dulles International Airport on Monday.
President Donald Trump invited Afrikaners, the descendants of mainly Dutch settlers, to move to the US in February to escape the alleged discrimination they face at the hands of the black majority in South Africa.
Mr Trump echoed his white South African-born ally Elon Musk, who used to be his US national security adviser, on Monday as he told reporters at the White House that there was “genocide that’s taking place”, with Afrikaners being killed.
Neither Mr Trump nor Mr Musk provided any evidence for this claim.
Mr Trump also denied favouring Afrikaners because they are white, saying that their race “makes no difference to me”.
South Africa said there is no evidence of persecution of Afrikaners or a “white genocide”, as Mr Musk called it, taking place in the country.
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Mr Landau said many of the South Africans who arrived in the US were farming families who could have the land they worked for generations expropriated. He also repeated Mr Trump’s claims that they were facing threats of violence.
Mr Trump’s order to resettle Afrikaners came after South Africa introduced a land law that enables the state to expropriate land in the public interest.
The policy caused concern among some white South Africans, despite no land being seized.
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The US president cut all financial assistance to the country due to his disapproval of the land policy and South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice against Israel, one of Washington’s allies.
‘We never expected this land expropriation thing to go so far,” said one of the arrivals, Charl Kleinhaus, 46, who came to the US with his daughter, son and grandson and is set to resettle in Buffalo, New York.
Mr Kleinhaus said that his life was threatened and that people tried to claim his property as their own, but his account could not be independently verified.
The US would welcome more Afrikaners in the coming months, according to a spokesperson for the State Department.
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“We think that the American government has got the wrong end of the stick here, but we’ll continue talking to them,” Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, said at a conference in Ivory Coast.
Mr Ramaphosa said that the white Afrikaners who arrived in the US had left South Africa because they were against the policies aimed at addressing racial inequality, which has persisted in the country since the apartheid rule of the white minority ended three decades ago.
