Trump asks Mike Pompeo to look at South African land seizures and 'large scale killing of farmers'

[Snellius]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to "closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures" and the killing of farmers there.

"I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and large scale killing of farmers," Trump said in a post on Twitter.

President Cyril Ramaphosa announced on Aug. 1 that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) is forging ahead with plans to change the constitution to allow the expropriation of land without compensation, as whites still own most of South Africa's land more than two decades after the end of apartheid.

Trump's tweet appeared to be a response to a Fox News report on Wednesday that focused on South Africa's land issue and murders of white farmers.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-asks-mike-pompeo-south-africa-land-white-killing-apartheid-2018-8

[struggle4progress]

1. South Africa rejects tweet on farmer killings

... 24 years since apartheid ended, white people - who make up just 9% of the population - own 72% of the farmland held by individuals, according to government figures ...

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.

After the end of apartheid in 1994, the ANC government said it wanted to return 30% of this land to its previous owners by 2014.

It is estimated that 10% of commercial farmland has been redistributed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-45282088

[MountCleaners]

2. More background

...on Fox News' sources:

AfriForum, which describes itself as a civil rights group, was formed in 2006 as an outgrowth of a white trade union. It focuses on the rights of Afrikaners, a South African ethnic group largely descended from Dutch and French Huguenot settlers. The organization has 280,000 dues-paying members, according to Roets.

Although AfriForum does not typically make explicitly racist statements, it often uses misleading or false data to characterize South Africa as a country in which white people are oppressed. When a South African land reform scholar tweeted statistics that undercut its claims about attacks against white farmers, Roets appeared to threaten her in a rant posted last Saturday on YouTube.

“Violent crime is a serious problem on farms, as it is in some urban areas in South Africa, but there is no indication that it is anything other than ordinary crime, and it certainly doesn’t justify a narrative of deliberate targeting of whites on the basis of their ethnicity,” said Nic Dawes, a deputy executive director at Human Rights Watch. “AfriForum uses the language of rights in pursuit of an agenda which is really about preserving white privilege in South Africa and elsewhere.”

A quarter-century after the end of white-minority rule in South Africa, the country’s white population still owns 72 percent of privately held farmland and a mere 10 percent of South Africans own 90 percent of the nation’s wealth. The post-apartheid government has bought up land for redistribution and assigned it to new owners, on the grounds that many were descended from black South Africans who unjustly lost their property during the colonial era and white rule.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ted-cruz-staff-usaid-met-group-called-apartheid-so-called-injustice_us_5af5dcb6e4b00d7e4c1a6571

[woodsprite]

3. He's probably looking at how to institute that here. nt

[MountCleaners]

4. Murders of farmers at a 20-year low

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/27/murders-of-farmers-in-south-africa-at-20-year-low-research-shows

This meme is far right in origin. I've been reading about it on far right Twitter for months. From the far right to Tucker Carlson to the President. There should be more response to the President's tweeting of far right conspiracy theories.

[Nonhlanhla]

5. I wish they would stay out of it

The land seizure issues as well as the farm murders are both serious and complex issues in South Africa. The ANC is not particularly effective, and they are pretty corrupt. Zuma stole billions and meanwhile millions are starving. The government is sitting on up to 4,000 farms that they have no distributed. White farmers, meanwhile, do have reason to fear for their lives, and the murders are extremely cruel. The farmers live in daily fear of their lives.

But the last thing South Africa needs is the interference of this incompetent Trump bunch. It will just make it worse, especially since it will further racialize and already racially fraught situation.

[HipChick]

7. Meanwhile Flint, Kids in cages...no one investigating the US government...

[Snellius]

6. "large scale killing of farmers"? Massacre of civilized whites by hordes of savage Zulus?

A very old Darwinian meme.

[IluvPitties]

8. White nationalism.