Nov. 8 (UPI) — President Donald Trump said the United States will not participate in the upcoming G20 conference in South Africa due to that nation’s alleged racial policies and killings of Afrikaners.
The G20 is scheduled Nov. 22 and 23 at the NASREC Expo Centre in Johannesburg, but the president cited the treatment of Dutch, French and German settlers and migrants as a cause for boycotting the event.
“It is a total disgrace that the G20 will be held in South Africa,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Friday.
“Afrikaners … are being killed and slaughtered, and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated,” the president said. “No U.S. government official will attend as long as these human rights abuses continue.”
Afrikaners have experienced rising hostility from some politicians and others in South Africa, including those who encourage violence and land confiscation.
The nation’s Expropriation Act of 2024 enables the South African government to confiscate land for public use, and without paying in some instances, in order to address matters involving equity, according to Fox News.
Many view the act as a mechanism to target white South African farmers and take their land without compensation, and Trump has accused South Africa of engaging in genocide.
The South African foreign ministry denied any racial oppression had occurred in a prepared statement shared with the BBC.
“The South African government wishes to state, for the record, that the characterization of Afrikaners as an exclusively white group is ahistorical,” the foreign ministry said.
“Furthermore, the claim that this community faces persecution is not substantiated by fact.”
When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited Trump at the White House in May, the president raised the matter of genocide against Caucasians in South Africa.
Ramaphosa denied any genocide has occurred and cited prior oppression of South Africans.
“We cannot equate what is alleged to be genocide to what we went through in the struggle because people were killed because of the oppression that was taking place in our country,” Ramaphosa told the president.
Trump then played a video that allegedly showed white crosses placed along a South African highway to mark where the bodies of white farmers are buried, Fox News reported.
Ramaphosa asked where the white crosses were located and said he never had seen the alleged video evidence.
Trump has granted refugee status to Afrikaners despite the South African government earlier saying claims of genocide are “widely discredited and unsupported by reliable evidence,” the BBC reported.
The G20 is a collection of 19 nations, plus the European Union, and was formed in 1999 to promote global economic stability in the wake of Asian financial troubles.
The G20 collectively represents 85% of the world’s economic output and two-thirds of its population and meets annually to discuss matters affecting member states and the world.
The United States is scheduled to host the annual event next year in Miami.