(BBC) – South Africa’s new ambassador to Washington has a personal reason to challenge Donald Trump’s assertion that there is a genocide against white Afrikaners – he is “a born Afrikaner” himself.
“Is he talking about us?”, Roelf Meyer remembers thinking, when he first heard President Trump say it.
His response to the US president’s claim is blunt.
The notion of a mass attack on the white Afrikaner minority in South Africa does not exist, he told the BBC, adding that his identity gave him the legitimacy to say so.
Meyer was one of the chief mediators to end white-minority rule known as apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s. He was appointed ambassador to the US in April, after diplomatic relations between the US and South Africa plummeted.
In an interview with the BBC, Meyer said the facts about violence in South Africa had been misrepresented and he never got a clear answer about where this “misdirection of information” was coming from.
Last year, Trump accused South Africa of white genocide in a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House and launched a US refugee pathway for Afrikaners.
