JOHANNESBURG -- South Africa's government lashed out at President Donald Trump on Thursday after he tweeted that his administration would be looking into farm seizures and the "large scale killing of farmers" in the country.
The government said Trump's tweet was based on "false information" and reflected a "narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past." It was meeting with the U.S. Embassy as it sought to clarify Trump's remarks.
South Africa is in the throes of a racially charged national debate over land reform, a lawful process that seeks to correct the legacy of decades of white minority rule that stripped land from black owners.
Today, nearly a quarter-century after the first democratic elections, black South Africans comprise 80 percent of the population but own just 4 percent of the country's land, according to the government.
Though the ruling African National Congress, which has been in power since 1994, has pledged to close that gap, progress has been slow. In July, President Cyril Ramaphosa said his party would amend the constitution so the state could expropriate land without compensation to speed up the process. Debate over the issue has grown ahead of next year's election.
Trump's tweet followed a segment on Fox News on Wednesday in which host Tucker Carlson claimed Ramaphosa had already started "seizing land from his own citizens without compensation because they are the wrong skin color," calling the alleged seizures "immoral."
Though South Africa's constitution has not yet been amended and the government has not seized any major agricultural land, the prospect has sent panic through some white farming communities who worry the policy will strip them of their land, cause land prices to plummet or make them the target of potentially violent land seizures.
For years, a small but vocal group of white South Africans have claimed white farmers are the target of violent, racially motivated farm attacks.
Experts say the attacks reflect the country's generally high crime rate and that there is no evidence connecting them to the race of the victims.
Killings on farms have been declining since their peak in 2001, according to research by Agri SA, an umbrella group of South African agricultural associations. In 2016-17, there were 74 slayings during farm attacks, according to Africa Check, compared with 19,000 killings across the country in the same period.
"People are not being targeted because of their race, but because they are vulnerable and isolated on the farms," said Gareth Newham, head of the crime and justice program at the Institute for Security Studies in the capital, Pretoria.
"There is no white genocide in South Africa," Julius Malema, leader of the opposition Economic Freedom Fighters party, told reporters. "There is black genocide in the USA; black people are killed every day. There is a black genocide here in South Africa; just recently a farmer was convicted for the murder of a black farmer."
AfriForum, a group that represents some white South African interests, welcomed Trump's comments. In May, its leaders went to the U.S. to lobby institutions and politicians about Ramaphosa's proposal to expropriate land and the alleged targeting of white farmers.
"Everyone in South Africa should hope that the pressure from the USA will lead to the [ruling party] reconsidering the disastrous route that they want to take South Africa on," AfriForum's Chief Executive Officer Kallie Kriel said in a statement.
Later Thursday in Washington, the State Department toned down Trump's language suggesting that land seizures were underway. Spokesman Heather Nauert said expropriating land without compensation "would risk sending South Africa down the wrong path," but she did not repeat the president's suggestion that large numbers of white South African farmers had been killed.
A Section on 08/24/2018