Donald Trump has said the US will not attend the G20 summit in South Africa over widely discredited claims that white people are being persecuted in the country.<\/p>\n
The US president said it was a \u201ctotal disgrace\u201d that South Africa is hosting the meeting, where leaders from the world\u2019s largest economies will gather in Johannesburg later this month.<\/p>\n
South Africa\u2019s foreign ministry described the decision by the White House as \u201cregrettable\u201d, while a spokesman for the foreign ministry, Chrispin Phiri, told BBC News that the success of the summit will not \u201crest on one member state\u201d.<\/p>\n
None of South Africa\u2019s political parties claim that there is a genocide in South Africa.<\/p>\n
That includes parties that represent Afrikaners and the white community in general.<\/p>\n
Speaking to the Newshour programme, Mr Phiri said that Trump was \u201corchestrating an imagined crisis\u2026 using the painful history of South Africa\u2019s colonial past\u201d.<\/p>\n
He also said there was \u201cabsolutely no evidence of white persecution in South Africa\u201d, adding: \u201cSouth Africa does have its problems and we are dealing with those. I think crime affects everyone, regardless of their race.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will move on without the United States,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social: \u201cIt is a total disgrace that the G20 will be held in South Africa.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfrikaners (people who are descended from Dutch settlers, and also French and German immigrants) are being killed and slaughtered, and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo US government official will attend as long as these human rights abuses continue.\u201d<\/p>\n
South Africa\u2019s government said the claims of a white genocide are \u201cwidely discredited and unsupported by reliable evidence\u201d.<\/p>\n
The claims were dismissed as \u201cclearly imagined\u201d by a South African court in February.<\/p>\n
Trump had earlier said South Africa should not be in the G20 at all, and that he would send vice-president JD Vance, instead of attending himself.<\/p>\n
But now the White House says no US official will go.<\/p>\n
Every year, a different member state hosts the G20 and sets the agenda for the summit \u2013 with the US due to take its turn after South Africa.<\/p>\n
The South African foreign ministry said in a statement: \u201cThe South African government wishes to state, for the record, that the characterisation of Afrikaners as an exclusively white group is ahistorical.<\/p>\n
\u201cFurthermore, the claim that this community faces persecution, is not substantiated by fact.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since returning to office in January, Trump has repeatedly accused South Africa of discriminating against its white minority, including in May when when he confronted his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has given Afrikaners refugee status, on the basis of the discredited \u201cgenocide\u201d claims. Last week, the White House announced plans to cap refugee admissions at a record low, and give priority to white South Africans. The South African government has pointed to the \u201climited uptake\u201d of the offer by South Africans.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Donald Trump has said the US will not attend the G20 summit in South Africa over widely discredited claims that white people are being persecuted in the country. The US president said it was a \u201ctotal disgrace\u201d that South Africa is hosting the meeting, where leaders from the world\u2019s largest economies will gather in Johannesburg […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124406\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}