SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
By Stephanie Burnett and Milan Pavicic
Johannesburg: US President Donald Trump showed a screenshot from a video taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of what he falsely presented as evidence of mass killings of white South Africans.
“These are all white farmers that are being buried,” Trump said, holding up a print-out of an article accompanied by the picture during a contentious Oval Office meeting in which he confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with unfounded claims of a genocide of Afrikaner farmers.
In fact, the video, published by Reuters on February 3 and subsequently verified by the news agency’s fact-check team, showed humanitarian workers lifting body bags in the Congolese city of Goma.
The image was pulled from Reuters footage shot after deadly battles with Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.
The blog post that Ramaphosa was shown by Trump during the White House meeting was published by American Thinker, a conservative online magazine, about conflict and racial tensions in South Africa and Congo.
The post did not caption the image but identified it as a “YouTube screen grab” with a link to a video news report about Congo on YouTube, which was credited to Reuters.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Andrea Widburg, managing editor at American Thinker and the author of the post in question, wrote in reply to a Reuters query that Trump had “misidentified the image”.
She added, however, that the post, which referred to what it called Ramaphosa’s “dysfunctional, race-obsessed Marxist government”, had “pointed out the increasing pressure placed on white South Africans”.
The footage from which the picture was taken shows a mass burial following an M23 assault on Goma, filmed by Reuters video journalist Djaffar Al Katanty.
Katanty said seeing Trump holding the article with the screengrab of his video came as a shock.
“In view of all the world, President Trump used my image, used what I filmed in [Congo] to try to convince President Ramaphosa that in his country, white people are being killed by black people.”
During the Oval Office meeting, Trump flipped through printed copies of articles that he said detailed murders of white South Africans, saying “death, death, death, horrible death”.
Later, the White House issued links to several media reports it said proved Trump was right, including two reports from Australia’s news.com.au and a Sky News Australia television editorial.
The tense exchange did not rise to a shouting match, but represented the most contentious Oval Office meeting since Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s late February slanging match with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Ramaphosa was in Washington to try to mend ties with the US after recent persistent criticism over South Africa’s land laws, foreign policy, and the alleged bad treatment of its white minority, which South Africa denies.
Separately, The New York Times reported that Trump falsely told Ramaphosa that footage of a rural road lined with white crosses and hundreds of vehicles showed the “burial sites” of “over 1000” white farmers in South Africa.
A Times analysis found the footage showed a 2020 memorial procession in South Africa for a white farming couple who police said had been murdered that year. The crosses were planted in the days before the event and later removed.
The misrepresentation happened when Trump asked that the lights be dimmed to play a video purporting to back up his assertions about a state-sanctioned mass murder of Afrikaners, the white ethnic minority that ruled South Africa during apartheid.
Making Ramaphosa watch the clip, Trump said: “These are burial sites right here. Burial sites. Over a thousand white farmers.”
A White House official later claimed that each cross represented a white farmer who had been killed – but did not comment on why Trump had said it showed burial sites, the Times reported.
It’s unclear where Trump got the video from. The Times reported that Elon Musk – who is originally from South Africa and was at the Oval Office meeting – had previously posted it on his social media site X. In the meeting, when Ramaphosa asked where the video was from, Trump said, “I mean, it’s in South Africa.”
The New York Times reported that there had been protests against the killing of white farmers in South Africa and that white crosses were known to be used at these events to represent victims.
As of 2022, white South Africans made up about 7 per cent of South Africa’s 60 million-plus population.
The country has an exceptionally high murder rate. The latest crime figures, which are not broken down by race, showed 6953 murders between October and December 2024, including 12 people killed in farm attacks, the BBC reported.
Of the 12, one was a farmer, while five were farm dwellers and four were employees, who are likely to have been black.
