The New Yorker:

By Robin Wright

On Monday, dozens of white Afrikaners arrived in Washington from Johannesburg, on a charter plane paid for by U.S. taxpayers. They were handed small American flags and greeted as refugees by the seconds-in-command from the Departments of State and Homeland Security, just hours after President Trump charged that South Africa was engaging in “genocide.” It’s a word he has refused to utter about other conflicts, present and past, including on anniversaries of the massacre of a million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. Afrikaners, who are the descendants of seventeenth-century European settlers in South Africa, are the only exception to an executive order issued by Trump, on his first day in office, that suspended refugee admissions, including for Afghans who aided Americans during the longest war ever fought by the U.S. He even dispatched diplomatic teams to recruit Afrikaners.

Human-rights groups—and even other Afrikaners—have been aghast. Last month, Max du Preez, the founding editor of Vrye Weekblad, an Afrikaans-language weekly, scolded Trump and his South African-born “first buddy,” Elon Musk, in an opinion piece for the Guardian. “We are not victims, there is no genocide,” he wrote. Afrikaners are “generally better off today” than when they ceded power three decades ago, when apartheid ended. White people make up seven per cent of the country’s population of sixty-four million, he noted, but still dominate the economy, and own more than half the nation’s farmland. In January, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed a law that allows land expropriation without compensation when it is “just and equitable and in the public interest.” Trump accused South Africa of “terrible things, horrible things,” including a land grab. South Africa compared the law to U.S. policy on eminent domain. And, du Preez added, “Not one square inch of it has been confiscated from white owners.”

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