Latest news with #raceRelations
The Herald
23-05-2025
- Politics
- The Herald
Trump's image of ‘dead white farmers' came from DRC, not SA
Andrea Widburg, managing editor at American Thinker and 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 after an M23 assault on Goma, filmed by Reuters video journalist Djaffar Al Katanty. "That day it was extremely difficult for journalists to get in. I had to negotiate directly with M23 and coordinate with the International Committee of the Red Cross to be allowed to film," Al Katanty said. "Only Reuters has video." Al 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 the DRC to try to convince President Ramaphosa that in his country, white people are being killed by black people," Al Katanty said.
BBC News
23-05-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
On di South African road wey Trump mistakenly identify as 'burial site'
P39-1 na one small tarred highway road wey connect two small towns Newcastle and Normandein for South Africa, na four hours drive from Johannesburg. Dis week, di road wey be single carriage way, wey dey run mainly beside farms around hills for KwaZulu-Natal province don become center of global attention. On Wednesday, plenty South Africans dey among pipo around di would wey dey watch for live TV wen US President Donald Trump ambush im South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa dey show am video wey suggest say white pipo dey chop persecution. Im bin don tok say "genocide" dey take place. Di video scenes wey gbege pass na di one wey show thousands of white cross by di road side - "burial site" President Trump tok am plenti times say di site na dat of thousands of Afrikaners wey dem murder in recent years. Di president no mention wia di road dey, but dem quickly link di video like say e happen for Normandein. But pipo wey dey live nearby know beta pass odas say di claim no be true. BBC visit di site on Thursday, a day afta di two presidents meet for Oval Office, only to find out say e don tey wey di P39-1 crosses disappear. No burial site dey dia, and di road look like any oda road. Dem don build new grain mill for one stretch of di road wia di cross dem bin dey. Wetin we see na community wey dey in shock as to how dem don turn talk of di town, and di truth about di crosses wey reveal plenti tins about how delicate race matter be for South Africa. Roland Collyer na man wey understand am well. Im be farmer for Afrikaner community for South Africa, na wen dem murder im aunty and uncle Glen and Vida Rafferty cause death for dia family five years ago, dis make dey build dose crosses. Attackers kill dem for dia farm, collect valuable property from dia homes, dis make di farming community to cry out, and lead to di temporary planting of di crosses by fellow Afrikaners, unto say dem wan highlight di murders and dat of oda farmers wey dem don kill for South Africa. "So di video una dey see, na dat of we as we dey stand together for roadside, e happun for dis section of di road." As e point hand down di hills, towards village wia black families dey live inside mud huts, e say "dem bin plant crosses for both sides of di road, e represent lives dem do take for dis farms, farm murders. All di way from di bridge, e waka down reach wia we dey stand now. Di crosses bin dey symbolic, e dey show wetin bin dey happun for di kontri." One of Rafferty neighbors wey be business man Rob Hoatson tell BBC how im organize di crosses to get public attention, na so di couple death affect dem. "E no be burial site," na so e tok, add say Trump too dey exaggerate, but add say im no mind say dem use di image of crosses. "Na memorial e be, no be permanent memorial we build, na temporary memorial." Mr Collyer continue to dey farm for di area but say di two sons of Mr and Mrs Rafferty live di area after di murder of dia parents. Di younger one don move go Australia while di elder one sell up and leave farming relocate to city. Many pipo still dey scared of dia future for South Africa, di kontri get one of di highest murder rates for di world. For 2022, dem convict two local men Doctor Fikane Ngwenya and Sibongiseni Madondo say na dem kill di Rafferty couple, dem also convict dem of robbery. Dia sentence na life imprisonment and 21 years imprisonment respectively. For many pipo wey dey di local community, dis na rare act of justice as plenti murder cases dey unsolved across di kontri wey President Ramaphosa tell President Trump say dem never still get grip of di crime rate wey dey go high. Di Rafferty case raise plenti dust ontop racial tension for di area. Dem force South Africa police minister to visit di area to calm tins down. Afrikaners do protests say dem dey chop mistreatments from white farmers. Ontop di matter, Mr Collyer tell me say even though dem use misleading video, im dey happy say President Trump dey highlight attacks on white farmers. "Di whole procession na to raise international media coverage of wetin dey happun," na so e tok. "And for dem to understand wetin we dey go through and how we dey live our life here at di moment for South Africa. "Pesin gass enter im house before dark, live behind electric fence. Dat na di kain life we dey live now and no be di kain live pesin wan live." Im fears dey like dat of odas, from all races, for kontri wey suffer more dan 26,000 murders last year. Plenti of di victims na black, according to security experts. President Trump don make offer of asylum to all Afrikaners, first group of 49 arrive Washington earlier dis month. But Collyer tell me say im go stay for Normandein and no get plan to leave South Africa. "E no dey easy for me to leave wetin my papa, my grandpapa and great grandpapa work for, plus how hard dem work." Na so e tok. "Dat na di difficult tin, just to pack up after plenti generations and try to leave di kontri. Unfortunately na ontop head of white Afrikaners e dey fall ontop for South Africa… but for dis stage, I no go tink of going, I still love dis kontri too much." As we dey comot, Mr Collyer add one comment about di future. "I think if we fit join hands, we get more dan enough pipo for dis kontri - black and white - wey dey willing to join hands and try to make dis kontri be a success again." Plenti pipo still dey for di local community wey be say farming dey follow dem from old generations. Along di road as we dey go Normandein town, we meet Bethuel Mabaso. E dey 63 years old and grow up for di area. E say e surprise am say im community don become international news - say even Us President use am as "evidence" to show say dem dey target white farmers. "Nothing like dat dey happun hia," e speak for im native Zulu language. "We bin dey shocked as community wen di murders happun and we dey sad for di family. "I don live hia since I be little boy, di area dey peaceful. Nothing like dat don happun hia since." Since di years wey di Rafferty couple die, reports don dey waka round from black dwellers say police no dey attend to cases wey involve black pipo wit di same manner dem use attend to di couple death case. I ask anoda 40 years old Mbongiseni Shibe how di relationship between farmers and dia mostly black staff. "We dey manage any issues wey show face through discussions, if e no work, we ask police to enter di matter," na so e tok. "Na sometin like incident wia our livestock enter dia fields and police help us bring am out and e fit happun from dia side too." Mr Shibe never forget how racial segregation matter dey be like for South Africa. "We dey come from difficult past for dis kontri wit white pipo, I remember dose time of abuse even as small boy wey I be den for di farms hia," "but we don let am go, we no Dey use am punish anyone." Additional reporting by Ed Habershon
Free Malaysia Today
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Free Malaysia Today
Dr M must share blame for frayed race relations, says ex-Umno MP
Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tan Cheng Lock, and VT Sambanthan are widely recognised as three of the country's founding fathers who ensured that their respective communities contributed to nation-building. PETALING JAYA : A former Umno MP says Dr Mahathir Mohamad must take some of the blame for the deterioration of race relations in Malaysia—a decline the former prime minister claims accelerated after he resigned in 2003. Tawfik Ismail said Mahathir's decision to focus on policies such as Malaysia Incorporated, which encourages closer collaboration between the public and private sectors, meant that other policies aimed at fostering unity had to take a back seat. He stated the nation's founding fathers had formed a multiracial leadership and approached the pressing issues of their time from a realistic standpoint. Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tan Cheng Lock, and VT Sambanthan are widely recognised as three of the country's founding fathers. Tawfik — the son of Malaysia's second deputy prime minister, Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman — said the trio formed a coalition of patriots and ensured that their respective communities contributed to nation-building. Tawfik Ismail. 'The spirit of 'give and take' was their guiding force,' the Sungai Benut MP from 1986 to 1990, told FMT. But when Mahathir came to power in 1981, Tawfik said policies and ideologies which were designed to fix race-relations after the 1969 racial riots, such as the Rukun Negara, became less of a priority. In some cases these post-May 13 policies were exploited, like the New Economic Policy. Tawfik said that Mahathir's administration had failed to put to good use the legal safeguards for Malay rights established after the May 13 riots and capitalised on them to push for greater Malay dominance, including in the private sector. Following the race riots, the Federal Constitution was amended to prohibit any challenge to the special privileges of Bumiputeras, Islam, and Malay as the national language. 'It was an attempt to moderate race-based politics and Rukun Negara was made as the national ideology. But Mahathir did not take these as foundation stones for nation building and instead entrenched Malay dominance in all sectors.' Dr Mahathir Mohamad. On May 8, Mahathir told FMT the racial divide in the country appeared to be widening and was more pronounced than during his time in office. Mahathir attributed racial tensions to the absence of a unifying national language and race-based political parties. He contrasted this with the relative harmony in neighbouring countries with sizeable Chinese populations, such as Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Wong Chin Huat, a political scientist at Sunway University, took aim at Mahathir, claiming that the perceived racial calm during his tenure as prime minister stemmed from his authoritarian rule. Wong Chin Huat. He said Mahathir subscribed to the belief that Malaysia belongs to the Malays, disregarding the perspectives of minorities—including those from Sabah and Sarawak—and framing national unity as contingent upon their assimilation. 'His ideas were shaped by the narrow nationalism and authoritarianism in the Cold War era. These are very last century (ideas).' Wong also suggested that Malaysia follow in Indonesia's footsteps by dismantling the excessive concentration of federal power to reduce the fear among Malays that the government could fall into the hands of other communities. 'If Malays can feel politically secure like Indonesian Muslims, the ethno-religious tensions that Mahathir laments would fade away,' he added.
BBC News
22-05-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Immigration is the albatross around UK politics
Figures released on Thursday by the Office for National Statistics are expected to reveal a fall in net migration to the UK. Politicians have long struggled to assuage public concerns over immigration and even with Thursday's expected fall, the issue is still likely to dog the Labour retrospect, 1968 looks like the decisive year. Until then, social class had been what determined the political allegiance of most voters: Labour drew its support from the still strong industrialised working class, while the Conservatives enjoyed the support of middle class and rural in 1968, two events launched a realignment, after which point Britons increasingly started to vote based on another, previously obscure, factor: attitudes to immigration and first was the 1968 Race Relations Act, steered through Parliament by the Labour Home Secretary, James Callaghan. It strengthened legal protections for Britain's immigrant communities, banning racial discrimination, and sought to ensure that second generation immigrants "who have been born here" and were "going through our schools" would have access to quality education to ensure that they would get "the jobs for which they are qualified and the houses they can afford". Discrimination against anyone on the basis of racial identity - in housing, in hospitality, in the workplace - was now second is the now notorious "Rivers of Blood" speech given by the Conservative politician Enoch Powell, in which he quoted a constituent, "a decent ordinary fellow Englishman", who told him that he wanted his three children to emigrate because "in this country in 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."The white British population, he said, "found themselves strangers in their own country".Powell had touched a nerve in a Britain which had brought hundreds of thousands of people from the West Indies, India and Pakistan in the years after the war. The Conservative Party leader Edward Heath sacked him from the front bench. The leaders of all the main parties denounced him. The Times called the speech "evil"; it was, the paper said, "the first time a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way".But the editor of a local paper in Wolverhampton, where Powell had made his speech, said Heath had "made a martyr" of Powell. In the days after the speech his paper received nearly 50,000 letters from readers: "95% of them," he said, "were pro-Enoch". For a time, the phrase "Enoch was right" entered the political had exposed a gap between elite opinion and a growing sense of alienation and resentment in large sections of the population. What was emerging was a sense, among some, that elites of both right and left, out of touch with ordinary voters' experience, were opening the borders of Britain and allowing large numbers of people into the became part of a cultural fault line that went on to divide British politics. Many white working-class voters would, in time, abandon Labour and move to parties of the right. Labour would become aligned with the pursuit of progressive causes. In the 20th century it had drawn much of its support from workers in the factories, coal mines, steel works and shipyards of industrial Britain. By the 21st century, its support base was more middle class, university-educated, and younger than ever has been a slow tectonic shift in which class-based party allegiances gradually gave way to what we now recognise as identity politics and the rise of populist anti-elite at the heart of this shift lay attitudes to immigration and race. Prime ministers have repeatedly tried to soothe public concern; to draw a line under the issue. But worries have remained. After that pivotal year 1968, for the rest of the 20th Century the number of people who thought there were "too many immigrants" in the country remained well above 50%, according to data analysed by the University of Oxford's Migration Keir Starmer's Labour government, elected last year on a manifesto promising to reduce migration, is the latest to have a go, with an overhaul of visa rules announced earlier this month. On Thursday, the annual net migration figures are very likely to show a fall in the number of people moving to the UK - something Sir Keir will likely hail as an early success for Labour's attempts to reduce migration numbers (although the Conservatives say their own policies should be credited).Can Sir Keir succeed where other prime ministers have arguably failed? And is it possible to reach something resembling a settlement with voters on an issue as fraught as migration? Softening attitudes? Dig into the nuances of public opinion, and you find a complicated number of Britons naming immigration as one of the most important issues - what political scientists call "salience" - shot up from about 2000 onwards, as the number of fresh arrivals to Britain ticked up and up. In the 1990s, annual net migration was normally in the tens of thousands; after the Millennium, it was reliably in the hundreds of Webb, a former Home Officer civil servant who is now head of home affairs at the centre-right Policy Exchange think tank, thinks concern over migration has been driven by the real, tangible impact it has had on communities."The public have been ahead of the political, media class on this," he says, "particularly poorer, working-class people. It was their areas that saw the most dramatic change, far sooner than the rest of us really realised what was happening. That's where the migrants went. That's where the sudden competition for labour [emerged]. You talk to cabbies in the early 2000s and they were already fuming about this."That fear of migrants "taking jobs" became particularly pressing in 2004, when the European Union (of which Britain was a member) took in ten new members, most of them former the communist states of Eastern Europe. Because of the EU's free movement rules, it gave any citizen of those countries the right to move here - and the UK was one of just three member nations to open its doors to unrestricted and immediate freedom of government, led by Tony Blair, estimated that perhaps 13,000 people per year would come seeking work. In fact, more than a million arrived, and stayed, by the end of the decade - one of the biggest influxes of people in British history. Most were people of working age. They paid taxes. They were net contributors to the public purse. Indeed, the totemic figure in this period was the hard-working "Polish plumber" who, in the popular imagination, was willing to work for lower wages than his British counterpart. Gordon Brown famously called for "British jobs for British workers", without explaining how that could be achieved in a Europe of free perception that Britain had lost control of its own borders gained popular traction. The imperative to "take back control" would be the mainstay of the campaign to leave the European Union.A decade on from that Brexit vote, "attitudes to immigration are warming and softening," says Sunder Katwala, the director of the think tank British Future. "Concern about immigration was at a very high peak in 2016, and it crashed down in 2020. Brexit had the paradoxical softening impact on attitudes… people who voted for Brexit felt reassured because they made a point and 'got control'. And people who regretted voting to leave became more pro-migration".Attitudes to immigration are, says Katwala, "very closely correlated to the distribution of meaningful contact with ethnic diversity and migration - especially from a young age. So places of high migration, high diversity, are more confident about migration than areas of low migration and low diversity, because although they might be dealing with the real-world challenges and pressures of change, they've also got contact between people." 'Island of strangers'? Why, then, did Sir Keir feel the need to say with such vehemence that unrestrained immigration had caused "incalculable damage" to the country, and that he wants to "close the book on a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy and our country"? Why did he say we risked becoming an "island of strangers" - leaving himself open to accusations from his own backbenchers that he was echoing the language of Powell in 1968? The answer lies in how attitudes are distributed through the population. Hostility to immigration is now much more concentrated in certain groups, and concentrated in a way that can sway elections."At the general election, a quarter of people thought immigration was the number one issue and they were very, very likely to vote for Nigel Farage," Katwala country as a whole may be becoming more liberal on immigration, but the sceptical base is also becoming firmer in its resolve and is turning that resolve into electoral fuelling that hostility is a lingering sense among some that migrants put pressure on public services, with extra competition for GP appointments, hospital beds, and school places. Stephen Webb of Policy Exchange thinks it is a perfectly fair concern. Data in the UK is not strong enough to make a conclusion, he says, but he points to studies from the Netherlands and Denmark suggesting that many recent migrants to those countries are a "fiscal drain" - meaning they receive more money via public services than they contribute in adds: "If you assume that the position is probably the same in the UK, and it's hard to see why it will be different, and you look at the kind of migration we've been getting, it seems likely that we've been importing people who are indeed going to be a very, very major net cost." Labour's plan So will Sir Keir's plan work? And how radical is it?Legislation to reduce immigration has, historically, been strikingly first sustained attempt to reduce immigration was the 1971 Immigration Act, introduced by Prime Minister Edward Heath. In 1948, the former troopship Empire Windrush had docked at Essex carrying 492 migrants from the West Indies, attracted by the jobs boom created by postwar reconstruction. Almost a million more followed in the years ahead, from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and Africa. They all arrived as citizens of the UK and Commonwealth (CUKC) with an automatic and legal entitlement to enter and stay. The 1971 Act removed this right for new Act was sold to the public as the means by which immigration would be reduced to zero. But from 1964 to 1994, immigrants continued to arrive legally in their 1978 Mrs Thatcher, then in opposition, told a television interviewer that "people are rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture", and she promised "to hold out the clear prospect of an end to immigration."Not a reduction; an today, almost 17% of the population of the UK was born abroad, up from 13% in 2014. Sir Keir's plan does not promise to end immigration. It is much less radical. It promises to reduce legal immigration by toughening visa rules. As part of the changes, more arrivals - as well as their dependents - will have to pass an English test in order to get a visa. Migrants will also have to wait 10 years to apply for the right to stay in the UK indefinitely, up from five years."It will bring down [net immigration] for sure," says Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. "If you restrict eligibility for visas, you will have lower migration. The Home Office calculation is that it will issue 98,000 fewer visas. That's in the order of 10%. It's not radical but it is a change."The White Paper also proposes to end visas for care workers. "This has been a visa that has been incredibly difficult for the government to manage," says Sumption. "It's been riddled with problems. There has been widespread fraud and abuse and so it's not surprising that they want to close it. The care sector will face challenges continuing to recruit. But I think closing the care route may be helpful for reducing exploitation of people in the country."Just a week after publishing the White Paper, the government was accused of undermining its own immigration strategy by agreeing in principle to a "youth experience scheme" with the EU - which may allow thousands of young Europeans to move to Britain for a time-limited period. Champions of the policy say it will boost economic growth by filling gaps in the labour market. But ministers will be cautious about any potential inflation to migration figures. It's another example of the narrow tightrope prime ministers have historically been forced to walk on this issue. Tensions on the Left There's another sense in which the Powell speech reaches into our own day. It created a conviction among many on the left that to raise concerns about immigration - often even to mention it - was, by definition, racist. Labour prime ministers have felt the sting of this criticism from their own Blair, who opened the doors in 2004, recognised this in his autobiography A Journey. The "tendency for those on the left was to equate concern about immigration with underlying racism. This was a mistake. The truth is that immigration, unless properly controlled, can cause genuine tensions… and provide a sense in the areas into which migrants come in large numbers that the community has lost control of its own future… Across Europe, right wing parties would propose tough controls on immigration. Left-wing parties would cry: Racist. The people would say: You don't get it."Sir Keir has felt some of that heat from his own side since launching the White Paper. In response to his warning about Britain becoming an "island of strangers", the left-wing Labour MP Nadia Whittome accused the prime minister of "mimic[king] the scaremongering of the far-right". The Economist, too, declared that Britain's decades of liberal immigration had been an economic success - but a political is a world of difference between Keir Starmer and Enoch Powell. Powell believed Britain was "literally mad, piling up its own funeral pyre" and that the country was bound to descend into civil war. Sir Keir says he celebrates the diversity of modern even if his plan to cut migration works, net migration will continue to flow at the rate of around 300,000 a year. Sir Keir's plan runs the risk of being neither fish nor fowl: too unambitious to win back Reform voters; but illiberal enough to alienate some on the reporting: Florence Freeman, Luke Mintz. BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. 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Washington Post
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
South Africa has a chance to reset relations with the U.S.
By almost any measure, South Africa is one of the continent's rare democratic success stories. Thirty-one years ago, the country managed a transition from its abhorrent apartheid regime to Black majority rule, narrowly averting a feared race war. And last year, it saw another peaceful transition: The ruling African National Congress or ANC — the party of Nelson Mandela — lost its parliamentary majority and entered into a broad-based governing coalition, including the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, long seen as representing the privileged White minority.
