[Image: Yeni Şafak News / Facebook]
A group of 49 white South Africans departed their homeland on Sunday for the United States on a private charter plane after having been offered refugee status by the Trump administration under a new program announced in February.
The group of ‘refugee boere’ were accompanied by police officers and airport officials as they made their way to check in at O.R. Tambo.
The group, which included families and small children, is due to arrive at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC this morning (Monday), according to Collen Mbisi, a spokesperson for South Africa’s transport ministry.
They are the first Afrikaners to be relocated after Trump issued an executive order in February, accusing the South African government of racial discrimination against them and announcing a program to offer them relocation to the US.
The South African government said it is “completely false” that Afrikaners are being persecuted.
While pausing other refugee programs and halting arrivals from Afghanistan, Iraq, most of sub-Saharan Africa and other countries that are actively at war at the moment, the Afrikaner applications had been fast-tracked after Trump claimed our government were pursuing “racist, anti-white polices” through affirmative action and targeting the group’s land with expropriation laws.
Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper pointed out last year, several of the most influential voices around Trump “are fifty-something white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa”.
“Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fundraiser for Donald Trump and a troll of Ukraine, grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons.”
Seems Trump likes the boere.
While the Trump administration’s claims of Afrikaner victimisation continue, the South African government clapped back, saying that Afrikaners are “amongst the most economically privileged” in the country.
White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, told reporters on Friday that the first batch of boere will be the first of a “much larger-scale relocation effort”. According to him, what was happening to Afrikaners in South Africa “fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created”.
According to a document obtained by the Associated Press, the Trump administration was ready to support the group with housing, furniture and other household items, as well as with expenses such as groceries, clothing and diapers.
What a weird time to be alive. We’re pretty sure most Afrikaners in South Africa are genuinely perplexed by the small minority who want to be part of the MAGA tribe, but they’ve made their choice, and now they have to live with it.
So be it. More biltong for us.
[Source: Guardian]
