Trump clashes with visiting Ramaphosa

SACRAMENTO — US President Donald Trump confronted visiting South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday with conspiracy theories on "white genocide" in South Africa, which Ramaphosa firmly denied.

During their meeting at the Oval Office, Trump pounced, moving quickly to a list of concerns about the treatment of white South Africans, which he punctuated by playing a video and leafing through a stack of printed news articles that he claimed proved his allegations.

With the lights turned down at Trump's request, the video, played on a television that is not normally set up in the Oval Office, showed white crosses, which Trump asserted were the graves of white people, and opposition leaders making incendiary speeches. Trump suggested one of them, Julius Malema, should be arrested. The video was made in September 2020 during a protest after two people were killed on their farm a week earlier.

"We have many people that feel they're being persecuted, and they're coming to the United States," Trump said.

Ramaphosa, who arrived in Washington with hopes of improving trade terms and easing bilateral tensions, rejected Trump's assertions during the meeting. He refuted the notion that white South Africans are fleeing the country due to racist policies. He said there was crime in South Africa and the majority of victims were black.

News outlets were shocked by Trump's rudeness, saying most of the information that he used during the meeting to try to prove that "white genocide" was happening in South Africa had "repeatedly been disproven".

"Of the laundry list of conspiracy theories brought out at Trump's meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa today, almost everything has been debunked. Some South Africans have said that they believe that the information is 'AfriForum propaganda', a white Afrikaner lobby group criticized as being a White nationalist group," CNN reported.

Commenting on this meeting, Sizo Nkala, a research fellow at the University of Johannesburg's Centre for Africa-China Studies, said: "There were parallels to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky's visit. It seems Trump's team wanted to ambush Ramaphosa with the videos of Julius Malema as evidence that their claims of white genocide in South Africa are true."

However, the fact that Ramaphosa's delegation came from different political parties and sectors of society made South Africa's pushback against the false genocide narrative even more credible, Nkala added.

'Pure lie'

Abbey Makoe, CEO of Global South Media Network, in South Africa, said the allegation that the minority Afrikaner farmers are being persecuted is a pure lie.

The lie was fabricated amid worsening relations between the US and South Africa, fueled by South Africa's move to haul US-backed Israel before the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide against the Palestinian people, he said.

"The saga of the Afrikaner minority, said to be largely from the farming community, are therefore a convenient excuse to pounce on Pretoria with a harsh public relations campaign aimed at causing reputational harm," he said.

The clash came at a time of strained relations between the two countries. Since Ramaphosa signed the Expropriation Act into law in January, Trump has criticized the land reform law for "discriminating" against the country's white people.

In recent months, Trump has repeatedly criticized South Africa, most notably by canceling the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief funding and claiming that a "genocide" against white South Africans is underway — an allegation denied by the South African government.

South Africa has pushed back against the US administration's accusations, saying the executive order of freezing aid "lacks factual accuracy and fails to recognize South Africa's profound and painful history of colonialism and apartheid."

In March, the United States expelled then South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool, further straining the relations. The expulsion came after Rasool addressed a webinar organized by the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection, commenting on the Trump administration.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that Trump would not participate in the upcoming meeting of the Group of 20 leaders in South Africa later this year.

"We decided not to participate in this year's G20 hosted by South Africa, either at the level of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or at the level of the president, and this was largely due to some of these issues that they put on their agenda and which, as we think, they do not reflect the priorities of this administration," Rubio told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

Ndumiso Mlilo in Johannesburg, South Africa and Edith Mutethya in Nairobi, Kenya, contributed to this story.

Xinhua - Agencies