Saturday, September 01, 2018

White Genocide?

There exists a growing influence of South Africa's conservative Afrikaner groups who are conducting global lobbying campaigns to support their message that white farmers are being targeted and killed, that the government is seizing their land, they are being discriminated against by affirmative action programmes and that their language is being sidelined.
Between April 2016 and March 2017, 74 people - of all races - were murdered on farms in South Africa, according to police figures, compared to more than 19,000 murders nationwide in the same period. The BBC has found that there is no reliable data to suggest farmers are at greater risk of being murdered than the average South African.
On the land question, the government has not yet started seizing farms but says it will change the constitution to allow it to expropriate land without compensation, hence the intense lobbying by those linked to farmers. The government says this is needed to reverse the forced eviction of black farmers under white minority rule. The Natives Land Act of 1913 restricted black people from buying or renting land in "white South Africa", leading to the forced removals of black people.
AfriForum is the main South African lobby group championing the cause of Afrikaners, especially farmers.
"They [Afriforum] are gripped in a siege mentality. They can't see a world where their privilege is challenged. They disregard history," said University of South Africa political analyst Somadoda Fikeni.
More than 24 years after the end of apartheid, white people enjoy average standards of living far higher than black South Africans. But Mr Fikeni accepts that it is unlikely that groups like AfriForum will give in easily. "Afrikaner nationalism was built around farming and language, so they see this as an existential crisis," he said.
AfriForum's leaders, Kallie Kriel and Ernest Roets, toured the US earlier this year, meeting conservative think-tanks, the government's international aid agency USAid, and Mr Trump's security adviser John Bolton, who was given a book which alleges that the South African government is complicit in the killing of white farmers, or boers.  Fox News' Tucker Carlson,  aired a programme about farm killings, and also hosted Mr Roets during AfriForum's US tour.
AfriForum is not the only Afrikaner group which has lobbied in the US. Another one is the far smaller and more extreme Suidlanders (Afrikaans for Southlanders), whose members Simon Roche and André Coetzee carried out a six-month visit to the US last year. They met various far-right activists, including David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and Trump supporter, as well as other white supremacists and Nazi sympathisers.
South African journalist Lloyd Gedye explained, "This network has allowed the Suidlanders to spread its message of 'white genocide' around the world." 
This includes Australia, where several right-wing rallies have been held this year with protesters - many of them white South African migrants - holding up placards such as "Recognise the genocide" and "Stop the murders". Australia's former Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said in March that he was looking at giving South Africa's white farmers access to fast-track visas because they were being "persecuted" and needed help from a "civilised" country.
Fikeni told the BBC "There are those who feel local cultures are being invaded, who want whiteness to be maintained in its purest form." 

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