South Africa police minister says Trump ‘twisted’ facts to push baseless genocide claims

By GERALD IMRAY and MICHELLE GUMEDE JOHANNESBURG AP South Africa s top law enforcement official disclosed Friday that U S President Donald Trump wrongly claimed that a video he displayed in the Oval Office was of burial sites for more than white farmers and he twisted the facts to push a false narrative about mass killings of white people in his country Related Articles Belgian princess left in doubt about her Harvard future following Trump s foreign aspirant ban Justice Department reaches deal to allow Boeing to avoid prosecution over Max crashes Why King Charles III is delivering a rare speech in Canada North Korean leader furious over failed destroyer launch vows to arrest those responsible China criticizes US ban on Harvard s international students Police Minister Senzo Mchunu was talking about a video clip that was played during the meeting between Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday that evidenced an aerial view of a rural road with lines of white crosses erected on either side Now this is very bad Trump disclosed as he referred to the clip that was part of a longer video that was played in the meeting These are burial sites right here Burial sites over a thousand of white farmers and those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning Mchunu announced the crosses did not mark graves or burial sites but were a temporary memorial put up in to protest the killings of all farmers across South Africa They were put up during a funeral procession for a white couple who were killed in a robbery on their farm Mchunu revealed A son of the couple who were killed and a local locality member who took part in the procession also commented the crosses do not represent burial sites and were taken down after the protest South Africa struggles with extremely high levels of violent crime although farm killings make up a small percentage of the country s overall homicides Both white and Black farmers are attacked and sometimes killed and the authorities has condemned the violence against both groups Whites make up around of South Africa s million people but generally still have a much better standard of living than the Black majority more than years after the end of the apartheid system of racial segregation Whites make up the majority of the country s wealthier commercial farmers Mchunu revealed Trump s false maintains that the crosses represented more than burial sites was part of his genocide story referring to the U S president s baseless charges in contemporary weeks that there is a widespread campaign in South Africa to kill white farmers and take their land that he has disclosed amounts to a genocide They are not graves They don t represent graves Mchunu disclosed regarding the video that has become prominent on social media since it was shown in the White House And it was unfortunate that those facts got twisted to fit a false narrative about crime in South Africa We have respect for the president of the United States Mchunu added But we have no respect for his genocide story whatsoever President Donald Trump meets South Africa s President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House Wednesday May in Washington AP Photo Evan Vucci The White House when sought about Mchunu s remarks pointed back to press secretary Karoline Leavitt s comments a day earlier at her briefing when she mentioned that the video manifested crosses that represent the dead bodies of people who were racially persecuted by their regime Of the more than homicides in South Africa from January through March six occurred on farms and of those one victim was white declared Mchunu In principle we do not categorize people by race but in the context of proposes of genocide of white people we need to unpack the killings in this category he announced Lourens Bosman who is a former lawmaker in the national Parliament announced he took part in the procession shown in the video the Trump administration played It happened near the town of Newcastle in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal in September The crosses were symbols to white and Black farmers and farmworkers who had been killed across South Africa over the previous years Bosman mentioned Trump s falsehoods that South Africa s governing body is fueling the persecution and killing of its minority white farmers has been strongly denied by the country which says the charges are rooted in misinformation Ramaphosa pushed for this week s meeting with Trump in what he disclosed was an attempt to change Trump s mind over South Africa and correct misconceptions about the country to rebuild ties Trump issued an executive order on Feb that cut all U S financial assistance to South Africa and accused it of mistreating white Afrikaner farmers and seizing their land The order accused Ramaphosa s cabinet of fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners Trump s executive order also accused South Africa of pursuing an anti-American foreign guidelines and specifically criticized its decision to launch a episode at the International Court of Justice accusing U S ally Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza The order accused South Africa of supporting the Palestinian militant group Hamas through that affair AP Africa news https apnews com hub africa