DIRCO rejects US refugee claims as critics highlight anti-white discrimination - Dave Steward

Key topicsSouth Africa’s policies embed racial quotas reducing white economic space and rights.Farm murders of whites exceed national average, with political incitement ignored.Courts and human rights bodies fail to protect minorities from racial discrimination..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Dave Steward.On 9 May the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) expressed its concern that “the United States has commenced with processing alleged refugees from South Africa and will begin resettling these citizens in the United States.”It stated that charges of discrimination against white South Africans were unfounded and concerns over farm murders were baseless. It claimed that “there are sufficient structures ... to address concerns of discrimination” and that South African courts had “demonstrated a principled commitment to protect minorities and vulnerable groups.”Really? The roots of pervasive anti-white discrimination are deeply embedded in the ANC’s National Democratic Revolution ideology which includes Radical Economic Transformation (RET). RET is defined as a “fundamental change in the structure, systems, institutions and patterns of ownership, management and control of the economy in favour of all South Africans, especially the poor, the majority of whom are African and female…”This approach has given rise to 118 race-based laws since 1994. They include laws affecting property - such as the Expropriation Act; andlaws affecting employment equity, affirmative action and state procurement - primarily the Employment Equity Act and the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act. Their intention is to close down progressively the economic space within which minorities can operate. Their goal is a National Democratic Society in which everything - wealth, land, property and employment - will be shared according to South Africa’s racial demographics. In February, 2014, then Deputy President Ramaphosa confirmed that “race (i.e. the need for racial discrimination) will remain an issue until all echelons of our society are demographically representative.”The latest manifestation of this process is the racial “targets” (in fact, quotas) that have been set for 18 sectors of the economy in terms of the 2024 Employment Equity Act. In numerous sectors and categories the white quota is under 4.4% - way below the white percentage of the economically active population. Yet, it can be expected that white quotas will be progressively ratcheted down to achieve the ANC’s goal of broad representivity.In 1994 the white share of the population was 12,8%. Now it is only 7,2%. So, white South Africans are now, theoretically, entitled to only 55% of the jobs, land and wealth that they could claim 31 years ago – simply because their community has grown more slowly than others - and because over a million white people have emigrated since then. According to the NDR, their share must decline to their shrinking percentage of the population irrespective of their existing rights and their contribution to the economy..Read more:.Worldview: Afrikaner family finds new start in Alabama under US refugee policy.The prospects for the future are not encouraging. 40% of South Africans in the over-80 age group are whites – compared with only 2,8% below the age of five. There are one and half times more whites in the 80+ age group than there are in the 0-4 group while there are more than 17 times as many black children in 0 – 4 group than there are black South Africans who are over 80.Demographic representivity presents an existential threat to minorities. On 31 January, 2020, former President FW de Klerk said that “it is a mathematical certainty that... wittingly or unwittingly the government’s racial policies – together with rampant crime and the threat to health services posed by the NHI - are posing an existential threat to our minority communities.”DIRCO is also wrong about farm murders.The farm murder rate is substantially higher than the national average;In 20% of farm murders, the victims were tortured;No other class of murder victims was the subject of sustained political incitement calling for their deaths.Two weeks ago five more people were murdered on South African farms. Two of them were deliberately burned to death. DIRCO is also woefully wrong in its claims that there are “sufficient structures ...to address concerns of discrimination” and that the courts have “demonstrated a principled commitment to protect minorities and vulnerable groups”.The South African Human Rights Commission has blatantly adopted a double standard when dealing with hate speech complaints by black and white South Africans. The Constitutional Court, in Minister of Finance v Van Heerden (2004), effectively stripped white South Africans of their protection against unfair discrimination in affirmative action cases under section 9 (2) of the constitution. The Constitutional Court has drawn a line through the constitutional right of Afrikaans-speaking South Africans to education in Afrikaans at university level. The Constitutional Court’s judgement in City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality v AfriForum (2016) questioned the constitutionally guaranteed right of Afrikaners to culture. In their dissenting judgement, Judges Cameron and Froneman observed that “the implication that may be drawn from the first judgment is that any reliance by white South Africans, particularly white Afrikaner people, on a cultural tradition founded in history, finds no recognition in the Constitution, because that history is inevitably rooted in oppression”.At the end of March this year the Constitutional Court refused to grant Afriforum leave to appeal against the 2024 SCA judgement that the singing of the “Kill the Boer” song was not hate speech. This was despite testimony from the preceding cases that Malema had said on 16 October 2022, that “You must never be scared to kill [in] a revolution’; and that “at some point there must be killing because the killing is part of a revolutionary act.” They also had before them Malema’s own testimony in the Equality Court in which he had refused to pledge that he would never call for the slaughter of white people and in which he had admitted to a prior statement that “we need a system to get rid of white people......So, if we go into a conference, or into Parliament and made a constitutional amendment that all whites should be driven into the sea, and any whites who remain here is going to be killed, then we engage in that type of programme to drive all whites into the sea.” President Ramaphosa has refused to condemn Malema’s singing of the “Kill the Boer” song or, as far as one can see, his other egregious racist statements. It was, no doubt, for reasons such as these, that the 59 Afrikaners jumped at the opportunity of leapfrogging the normal US immigration process by claiming the refugee status that President Trump had so generously offered. President Trump is wrong to claim that there is genocide – now - in South Africa. However, DIRCO is deluded if it thinks there is no discrimination against white people in South Africa; that farm murders are just another manifestation of crime in the country; or that our courts have “demonstrated a principled commitment to protect minorities and vulnerable groups.”Do these concerns amount to a “well-founded fear of persecution” as required for refugee status by the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol? If one listens to DIRCO, the answer is “no” - but if one takes seriously the racial programme of the NDR and the threats of Julius Malema (who sees himself as a future president), the answer, unfortunately is “yes”.

DIRCO rejects US refugee claims as critics highlight anti-white discrimination - Dave Steward

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