Foreign ministry hardens language against Australian minister who offered farmers visa help from his ‘civilised country’

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

South Africa demanded on Thursday that Australian home affairs minister Peter Dutton retract comments that suggested white farmers were being persecuted and should receive fast-tracked humanitarian visas from a “civilised country”.

Pretoria summoned Canberra’s high commissioner over Dutton’s remarks, which also included a description of white farmers facing “horrific circumstances”, a characterisation South Africa has rejected.

“The South African government is offended by the statements which have been attributed to the Australian home affairs minister and a full retraction is expected,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

South Africa criticises Australian plan to fast-track white farmer visas Read more

Commenting this week on a documentary about violent rural crime in South Africa, Dutton said the farmers deserved “special attention”. “I do think, on the information that I’ve seen, people do need help and they need help from a civilised country like ours,” Dutton said.

He also pointed to plans by new president Cyril Ramaphosa to allow expropriation of land as a solution to the massive land ownership inequalities that remain more than two decades after the end of apartheid.

On Friday the foreign minister Julie Bishop said Australia’s high commission has “regular discussions” with the South African government and urged it to ensure the security of its citizens.

Changes to land ownership should not be “disruptive to the economy nor lead to violence”, she told ABC’s Radio National.

Bishop said Australia closely monitors the murder rate and was “very concerned that there were 19,000 murders reported in South Africa in 2017”.

Asked if the farmers should get special visas, Bishop said Australia had an existing offshore humanitarian visa program for which people claiming to be displaced by persecution, including in South Africa, could apply.

“All claims for humanitarian visa entry into Australia are assessed on their merits, so I’m working with the home affairs minister to ascertain if any changes are needed to our existing offshore humanitarian visa program.”

Gareth Newham at the Institute for Security Studies, one of South Africa’s leading authorities on crime statistics, said there was no evidence to support the notion that white farmers were targeted more than anyone else.

He said: “In fact, young black males living in poor urban areas like Khayelitsha and Lange face a far greater risk of being murdered. The murder rate there is between 200 and 300 murders per 100,000 people.” The highest estimates of farm murders stand at 133 per 100,000 people, and that includes both black and white murder victims.

Fact-checking organisation Africa Check, in a detailed report on the subject of farm murders in general – not just of white farmers – suggested that another credible estimate of the farm murder rate could be as low as 0.4 murders per 100,000 people. But it too concluded that an accurate figure is “near impossible” to determine due to a lack of evidence.

Speaking to parliament this week, Ramaphosa said South Africa was not heading down the road towards the type of violent and chaotic seizure of white-owned farms that triggered economic collapse in Zimbabwe nearly 20 years ago.

“We cannot have a situation where we allow land grabs, because that is anarchy,” Ramaphosa said. “We cannot have a situation of anarchy when we have proper constitutional means through which we can work to give land to our people.”

Afriforum, a rights group that mainly represents the views of the white Afrikaner minority, describes being a white farmer as one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, saying a white farmer is twice as likely to be murdered as a police officer, and four times as likely as a private citizen.

The government denies that white people are deliberately targeted and says farm murders are part of South Africa’s wider violent crime problem.



