Extreme Gewalt ohne Völkermord

Although Donald Trump “cheapened the word ‘genocide’ by using it to describe the situation of Afrikaner farmers, many conditions that fall short of genocide are nonetheless intolerable, including living in a country of extreme and routine violence,” Graeme Wood writes. “In that way, the plight of white South Africans resembles, as Ramaphosa suggested, that of their black countrymen. When white farmers are slaughtered in their homes, their murderers’ motivations are not, as Ramaphosa suggested, always genocidal.”

“White racists were preoccupied with these sometimes brutal, often extremely idiosyncratic, sometimes just strange incidents well before they became a source of outrage and fascination for Trump and people orbiting him,” Wood continues. “They have implied that South Africa is experiencing what Zimbabwe suffered a quarter century ago: government-sanctioned attacks on white farmers, uncompensated seizure of their land, and eventually the collapse of the country’s agricultural sector and ability to feed itself.”

AfriForum, a Pretoria-based advocacy group, tracks these incidents. Even its data do not suggest organized mass killings or farm seizure resembling Zimbabwe’s during the late Robert Mugabe era, but its numbers do suggest that the murder rate for white farmers is higher than for the general population, and possibly as much as double the already very high national rate.

Nevertheless, Kallie Kriel, AfriForum’s CEO, declined to say that “genocide” was taking place just yet, and he refused to accept one of Trump’s premises: that Afrikaners are helpless victims who need shelter abroad. “If we were victims, we would just say we’re finished, and that would be that,” he told Wood.

A different kind of response can be seen in the town of Orania, a whites-only private settlement founded after the fall of apartheid. “The survival and growth of this pasty rural town, which now has thousands of inhabitants, is evidence that Trump’s assessment of South Africa—that it is systematically attempting to murder its white farmers—is wrong,” Wood writes.

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— Evan McMurry, senior editor, audience and engagement, *The Atlantic*