Pre-Trump government reports of human rights abuses in South Africa help lend credibility to President Donald Trump‘s claims that white South African refugees, farmers in particular, do face disproportionate race-based violence in their home country, according to a Washington Examiner review of U.S. State Department records.
The reports on white farmers being killed in South Africa date back decades, seemingly supporting Trump’s embrace of the arriving Afrikaners, the nation’s white minority population, who he says are rightfully fleeing from racial persecution.
Most recently, a Biden-era 2023 State Department report on human rights conditions in South Africa cited a civil society organization’s findings concerning violence against white farmers: In 2021 and 2022, there were nearly 750 attacks and more than 100 killings.
However, the State Department report noted, while some advocacy groups asserted that these burglaries, home invasions, and murders were racially motivated, other observers attributed the incidents to South Africa’s exorbitantly high crime rate. According to African crime research, last year, South Africa was ranked the most dangerous country on the continent, with one of the world’s highest homicide rates.
But the large-scale killings of white South African farmers have been a prevailing problem that predates Trump’s first term.
The State Department’s previous reports on human rights violations in South Africa consistently documented, as far back as 1999, concerns that white farmers were being “racially targeted.”
“Killings and other violent crimes against white farmers and, on occasion, their families, continued in rural areas,” the State Department has noted in annual South Africa reports since then.
Other reports over the years mentioned “continued killings of mostly white farm owners by black assailants,” though the State Department said studies showed the perpetrators were “generally common criminals motivated by financial gain” and “no evidence exists” proving that the murders were “part of an organized political conspiracy.”
In a 2013 report, the State Department said 68 white farmers were killed during 176 attacks by black perpetrators the year before that, a 34% increase between reporting periods, according to Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa statistics. The South African Institute of Race Relations said commercial farmers, who were predominantly white, were “twice as likely to be killed as the average citizen,” per the State Department report.
The report from 2012 noted there were still no arrests made in connection with the February 2011 killings of white farmers Deon van Staden, 51, and Babs Strecker, 73, who were stabbed multiple times and beaten to death with a shovel in their home.
Genocide Watch, founded by former State Department official Gregory Stanton, said widespread killings of white farmers “continue with impunity.” According to the organization’s country report, local authorities have failed to prosecute these murders meant to terrorize white farmers into emigrating from South Africa.
FLEEING PERSECUTION, SOUTH AFRICAN ARRIVALS SCRAMBLE REFUGEE POLITICS
“Many of the murders are hate crimes,” Genocide Watch wrote. With encouragement from the Economic Freedom Fighters, a black nationalist party in South Africa inciting anti-white violence, the perpetrators would torture, rape, and disembowel their victims. White farmers are often rendered defenseless because South Africa banned private gun possession and disbanded mutual protection cooperatives organized by farmers in the past, Genocide Watch explained.
Genocide Watch said South Africa is in “Stage 6: Polarization” of the genocidal process outlined by Stanton, whose 10-stage genocide model is used in genocide prevention practices across the globe. White farmers are named as a targeted group.
Earlier this month, Trump welcomed dozens of Afrikaners to resettle in the United States as refugees, saying they are targets of genocide and losing their land to race-based, state-sanctioned property seizures. Critics opposing their arrival are disputing that this racial discrimination rises to the level of genocide, or that discrimination even exists there.
In a meeting in the Oval Office with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa last week, Trump showed video evidence of hate publicly directed at Afrikaners, also known as Boers. The footage depicted Julius Malema, the far-left militant leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, chanting, “Kill the Boers,” at a rally in March.
