Some Afrikaners Cheer as Trump Amplifies Claims of Persecution

For decades, some members of the white Afrikaner minority have been trying to convince anyone and everyone who would listen that they are the true victims in post-apartheid South Africa.

They have made claims of mass killings of their people and widespread land grabs by a Black-led government that they insist is seeking retribution for the sins of the Afrikaner-led apartheid government. Their stories have been false or greatly exaggerated, but that hasn’t stopped them from being widely amplified and repeated online.

Afrikaners, an ethnic group that descended from European — primarily Dutch — colonizers, have found a champion of their cause in President Trump, and it has led to a moment that few of them could have imagined.

Mr. Trump on Friday put the weight of American influence behind a hotly disputed claim that Afrikaners were the “victims of unjust racial discrimination,” issuing an executive order to allow them to migrate to the United States as refugees, and halting aid to South Africa.

The move was met with dismay in South Africa, a majority-Black nation where more than 90 percent of the population comes from racial groups persecuted by the racist, apartheid regime. These groups — Black, Colored and Indian — remain statistically far behind the white minority in virtually every economic measure.

There have been gruesome murders of white farmers, the focus of the Afrikaner grievances, but police statistics suggest that they account for a very small share of the country’s killings.