Johannesburg, South Africa – On a cold Sunday evening in Johannesburg, or Tambo International Airport was packed with tourists and travelers entering and leaving South Africa’s busiest airport.
Dozens of people lined up on one side of the International Departure Hall.
Clothes casually and comfortably for the subsequent 13-hour journey, the group – most young, all white – spoke between them while avoiding the onlookers. They blended into the bustling terminals around them, but these were not ordinary travelers. They were Africans and left South Africa as Donald Trump’s American refugees.
When Charle Kleinhaus first applied to resettle refugees in the United States earlier this year, he was threatened and told officials that people tried to assert his property.
The 46-year-old, who claimed to own a farm in Limpopo, South Africa’s northernmost province, did not need to provide evidence of these threats or provide details about when the suspected incident occurred.
On Sunday, he joined dozens of others accepted by the Trump administration as part of a pilot program that allows people from the African community to escape.
The Trump administration has argued that white people face discrimination in South Africa. South Africa is a country that accounts for about 7% of the population but owns more than 70% of the land and accounts for the majority of its top management position.
“I want you to know that you are truly welcome here and that we respect what you have had to deal with over the last few years,” U.S. Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau told Kleinhouse and others when they landed at Dulles International in Virginia.
“We respect the long traditions of your people and what you have accomplished over the years,” he said Monday.
Speaking to an airport journalist, Kleinhouse said that South Africa “doesn’t expect this land expropriation to go anytime.”
He was referring to the recently passed expropriation law. This allows the South African government to take land for public use without compensation in exceptional circumstances. Pretoria says the measure aims to correct the injustice of apartheid. This is because Black South Africans, who make up more than 80% of the population, still own only 4% of the land.
South African officials say the law did not bring about grabs of the land. Furthermore, there is no record of Kleinhouse’s property being expropriated.
Kleinhaus was not affected by any threats and the government was unaware of anyone who might have threatened his property, President Kumbjo Nutshaveni’s minister told Al Jazeera.
“The South Africans have not been affected by land expropriation. There is no evidence. No one has been affected by farm murders,” the minister emphasized.
Untrusted “genocide” claim
When Trump signed an executive order granting Africans the status of refugees in February, he cited the claim that their land had been seized and brutally killed in South Africa.
On Monday, Trump once again claimed that Africans were victims of “genocide.” The accusations maintained by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and other experts are based on lies.
“The farmers are being killed,” Trump told reporters. “White farmers have been brutally killed, and land has been confiscated in South Africa.”
Ramaphosa also exposed the allegations that the group left this week faced persecution at their homes.
“They are leaving because they don’t want to embrace the democratic transformation that unfolds in South Africa,” he said.
For 60-year-old Sam Busa, it was a hopeful moment to see Kleinhaus and 48 other South Africans leaving to resettle in the United States.
Busa, who has applied for asylum, is waiting in anticipation of an interview entitled to resettlement. She began selling extra household items in anticipation of her new life in the US.
The semi-retired businessman is at the forefront of an effort to encourage Africans to be interested in the offer to grant Africans the status of refugees on the grounds of facing racial persecution in South Africa through a website called Amerikaners.
When asked how she experienced persecution because of her race, Busa recounted the incident in which she was detained at muzzle at her home in Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial capital and one of the world’s most dangerous cities.
She later moved to KwaZulu-Natal on the country’s east coast, where she ran a business serving the government.
When asked if she believed she was targeted for her race or simply a victim of a general crime, Busa insisted that it was not important.
She was not safe, she said. “I’m not overly sensitive. It’s very scary to see Julius Malema singing about killing Bohr.”
Malema, a far left leader of the Economic Freedom Fighter (EFF) political party, often sings the famous anti-apartheid song “Kill the Boer (peasant meaning Boer of Afrikaans).
‘persecution’
For Busa, like Kleinhaus, new laws were passed to enhance racial change, including setting specific employment targets for employment equity, but “straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“Uncompensated expropriation is a major issue, along with amendments to employment equity,” she said, expressing her belief that white people have no future in South Africa.
“It’s getting so fast, and for South Africans it’s becoming clear to (white) South Africans that we are suffering from the fear of a home break-in. I don’t live on a farm, but there’s a great deal of fear due to the constant threat of crime. It’s become clear to white South Africans. It’s not disguised,” she said.
Despite the fact that some experts have denied claims that they are victims of racially motivated attacks and are not a common crime, horror stories are common among people engaged in refugee programs.
South Africa sees about 19,000 murders a year. Police data show that most victims of rural crimes are black and there is evidence that white farmers are not killed disproportionately.
Meanwhile, many participants in the US African Refugee Resettlement Program do not live on farms. According to Minister Ntshavheni, many are city residents.
Katia Bedan, who lives in Cape Town, is also expecting to settle the country in the United States. She told Al Jazeera that hopeful refugees do not need to prove racial persecution, and simply need to clarify it.
“For me, it’s racial persecution and political persecution,” she said of why she wanted to leave South Africa.
The copywriter-turned-student coach pointed to the Racial Change Act, targeting employment equity and land expropriation.
However, many other South Africans look at sections of African communities. Right-wing lobby groups that first pushed the false narrative of “white genocide” including right-wing lobby groups like Afriforum have struggled to exist equally in a country they were once considered superior for their race.
“I think we’re struggling with the reality that Afriforum is normal,” social justice activist Thuli Madonsela, a former public guardian in South Africa, told local television channel Newzroom Afrika in March.
“The new South Africa calls for us all to be normal, but colonialism and apartheid have made white people special.
“I think there are people who are trying to turn the wheels around and find a special reason again. It seems they’ve found an alliance in the US president,” she said.
“Absurd and ridiculous”
In February, he had shut down his country’s refugee programs to other asylum seekers from areas starved by the world’s war.
For Lauren Landau of the African Immigration Association Centre at the University of Witwatersland in Johannesburg, migrating African refugees is “absurd and ridiculous.”
“They are not welcomed as tourists or work permits, but not as refugees. The idea of the refugee system is to protect people who cannot be protected by their state, and to protect people who are or who fear persecution or violence because of their membership in social groups. He asked.
“There are people in South Africa who distinguish them,” he said, and Africans “have fewer privileges and protections than they were in the apartheid era,” but this does not represent the state’s policy.
“Did they (Africans) be especially sacrificed for who they are? Absolutely not!” Landau was added.
He said all statistics on land ownership, income and education levels indicate that South Africa’s white population is far superior to others.
Even the fringe groups that may have sought a grab for the land have done little to enact their threat, observers note.
But for ugly people, that’s not a problem. “I’m afraid of my children. You never know when Ephe will decide when they wanted you to die. It’s not the country I want to live in,” she said. The EFF says those who have decided to leave South Africa should revoke their citizenship.
Faced with the implications of this situation, the government is considering whether people leaving as refugees can easily return to the country. Ramaphosa will discuss ongoing issues with Trump at its US meeting next week.
Meanwhile, for Africans currently in the US, most people settle in Texas, others in New York, Idaho, Iowa and North Carolina, and the government helps them find jobs and accommodation.
They will hold refugee status for a year, then they can apply for a US green card to become permanent residents. At the same time, the Afrikaner resettlement program remains open to others who wish to apply.
When Kleinhouse and his group arrived in the United States on Monday, they smiled in their faces as they met with authorities and waved the US flag.
But for the South African president, their resettlement in the US marks what he believes is a “sad moment for them.”
“As South Africans, we are resilient. We don’t run away from the issues,” he said Monday at the Fried State agricultural exhibition.
“If you look at all the national groups in our country, black and white, they stay in this country because they are our country.
“There’s no country like South Africa, so we can bet that they (the Africans who left) will come back soon.”