Trump on bending rules for Afrikaners

United States (US) President Donald Trump stated that he is bending the rules to allow white Afrikaners South Africans to enter the country as refugees.

This announcement follows the departure of the first group of 49 Afrikaners refugees, who left South Africa for the US on Sunday and have since arrived in the country, receiving a warm welcome from Washington officials.

During a press conference at the White House on Monday, Trump claimed that the Afrikaners are fleeing a “terrible situation” in South Africa. When asked why he was bending rules for South Africans while not prioritising applications from war-torn countries like Sudan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he said white farmers were killed.

“Because they’re being killed and we don’t want to see people be killed. South Africa’s leadership is coming to see me, I understand, sometime next week, and you know we’re supposed to have a G20 meeting there, and I don’t know if we can go unless the situation is taken care of. There is a genocide that is taking place that you people don’t want to write about,” Trump said.

Trump says Afrikaners are ‘brutally killed on farms’

“Farmers are being killed, they happen to be white; whether they are white or black, it makes no difference to me, but white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa and the newspapers and television media don’t even talk about it. If it were the other way around, they’d talk about it, and that would be the only story they talk about.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa dismissed claims that Afrikaners were being persecuted and said he and Trump had a telephonic conversation over the issue.

“I said ‘president, what you have been told by those people who are opposed to transformation back home in South Africa is not true.

“I added that we were well taught by Nelson Mandela and other iconic leaders like Oliver Tambo on how to build a united nation out of the diverse groupings that we have in South Africa.

“We are the only country in the continent where the colonisers came to stay and we have never driven them out of the country, so they are staying and they are making great progress,” he said.

Do you think Trump will change his tune after meeting Cyril?

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