JOHANNESBURG: South Africa’s top law enforcement official said Friday that US President Donald Trump wrongly claimed that a video he showed in the Oval Office was of burial sites for more than 1,000 white farmers and he “twisted” the facts to push a false narrative about mass killings of white people in his country.
Police Minister Senzo Mchunu was talking about a video clip that was played during the meeting between Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday that showed an aerial view of a rural road with lines of white crosses erected on either side.
“Now this is very bad,” Trump said as he referred to the clip that was part of a longer video that was played in the meeting. “These are burial sites, right here. Burial sites, over a thousand, of white farmers, and those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning.”

Mchunu said the crosses did not mark graves or burial sites, but were a temporary memorial put up in 2020 to protest the killings of all farmers across South Africa. They were put up during a funeral procession for a white couple who were killed in a robbery on their farm, Mchunu said.
A son of the couple who were killed and a local community member who took part in the procession also said the crosses do not represent burial sites and were taken down after the protest.
South Africa struggles with extremely high levels of violent crime, although farm killings make up a small percentage of the country’s overall homicides. Both white and Black farmers are attacked, and sometimes killed, and the government has condemned the violence against both groups.
Whites make up around 7 percent of South Africa’s 62 million people but generally still have a much better standard of living than the Black majority more than 30 years after the end of the apartheid system of racial segregation. Whites make up the majority of the country’s wealthier commercial farmers.
Mchunu said Trump’s false claims that the crosses represented more than 1,000 burial sites was part of his “genocide story” — referring to the US president’s baseless allegations in recent weeks that there is a widespread campaign in South Africa to kill white farmers and take their land that he has said amounts to a genocide.

“They are not graves. They don’t represent graves,” Mchunu said regarding the video that has become prominent on social media since it was shown in the White House. “And it was unfortunate that those facts got twisted to fit a false narrative about crime in South Africa.”
“We have respect for the president of the United States,” Mchunu added. “But we have no respect for his genocide story whatsoever.”
The White House, when asked about Mchunu’s remarks, pointed back to press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s comments a day earlier at her briefing, when she said that “the video showed crosses that represent the dead bodies of people who were racially persecuted by their government.”
Of the more than 5,700 homicides in South Africa from January through March, six occurred on farms and, of those, one victim was white, said Mchunu. “In principle, we do not categorize people by race, but in the context of claims of genocide of white people, we need to unpack the killings in this category,” he said.
Lourens Bosman, who is a former lawmaker in the national Parliament, said he took part in the procession shown in the video the Trump administration played. It happened near the town of Newcastle in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal in September 2020. The crosses were symbols to white and Black farmers and farmworkers who had been killed across South Africa over the previous 26 years, Bosman said.
Trump’s falsehoods that South Africa’s government is fueling the persecution and killing of its minority white farmers has been strongly denied by the country, which says the allegations are rooted in misinformation.
Ramaphosa pushed for this week’s meeting with Trump in what he said was an attempt to change Trump’s mind over South Africa and correct misconceptions about the country to rebuild ties.
Trump issued an executive order on Feb. 7 that cut all US financial assistance to South Africa and accused it of mistreating white Afrikaner farmers and seizing their land. The order accused Ramaphosa’s government of “fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”
Trump’s executive order also accused South Africa of pursuing an anti-American foreign policy and specifically criticized its decision to launch a case at the International Court of Justice accusing US ally Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The order accused South Africa of supporting the Palestinian militant group Hamas through that case.
 

Russia attacked Ukraine’s capital Kyiv early on Saturday with drones and missiles, triggering fires, strewing debris in districts throughout the city and injuring at least eight people, the city’s mayor said.
Reuters witnesses saw and heard successive waves of drones flying over Kyiv, and a series of explosions jolted the city.
Mayor Vitali Klitschko said two residents had required hospital treatment and that air defense units were in action.
Klitschko said fragments from one drone struck the top floor of an apartment building in the Solomyanskyi district on the west bank of the Dnipro River, which bisects the city. One apartment building was on fire in the area as was one non-residential building.
Timur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said a fire had also broken out on two floors of an apartment building in Dniprovskyi district on the opposite bank.
Officials also reported a fire in Obolon in the city’s northern suburbs and fallen debris on a shopping center in the same area. They said drone fragments hit the ground in a number of other widely separated neighborhoods.
An air alert remained in effect more than two hours after it was first declared.
The overnight strikes followed several days of Ukrainian drone attacks — some 800 attacks — on targets inside Russia, including capital Moscow.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had vowed on Friday to respond to those attacks.