A white South African man has been granted refugee status in Canada after successfully arguing his skin colour would put his life in danger if he returned home.
Brandon Huntley, from Cape Town, fled to Canada last April. He told immigration officials that he had been attacked seven times by black South Africans who called him a “white dog” and a “settler”.
In a move which infuriated the ruling African National Congress (ANC), an Immigration Board in Ottawa has ruled that Mr Huntley's “fear of persecution by African South Africans” is justified.
William Davis, the only member of the board, ruled that the 31-year-old unemployed former salesman would “stick out like a sore thumb due to his colour in any part of the country.”
He added that Mr Huntley, whose sister lives in Canada and who argued that affirmative action policies put him at a further disadvantage, had given “clear and convincing” proof of the state’s “inability or unwillingness to protect him”.
With some 52 murders a day, South Africa has one of the worst crime records in the world. However, the ruling ANC denies it is racially inspired and argues with considerable justification that blacks are just as much victims as whites and other minorities. However, there is little sympathy shown by the authorities to white crime victims who are frequently dismissed as “white whingers”.
Both the Government and the ANC slammed Canada’s decision as racist, saying it perpetuated false stereotypes that black people attacked white, whereas both are victims of crime which newly elected President Jacob Zuma has pledged to reduce.
“We find the claim by Huntley to have been attacked seven times by Africans due to his skin colour without any police intervention sensational and alarming,” said the ANC’s Brian Sokutu. “Canada's reasoning for granting Huntley a refugee status can only serve to perpetuate racism."
The ruling has struck a chord with many whites, who say that the Government has done nothing to stop a wave of attacks on white farmers since 1994 and is deliberately failing to make public crime statistics in the hope of improving the country’s image ahead of the 2010 soccer World Cup.
AfriForum, a Afrikaner civil rights organisation, immediately seized on the ruling to try and highlight the issue of “white flight” from the country, which has suffered a huge brain drain since the end of apartheid in 1994.
It asked the Home Affairs minister to appoint a task team to probe the reasons for emigration of minority communities. A recent report by the South African Institute on Race Relations said that some 800,000 whites out of a population of four million had left the country since 1994. It added, however, that many educated blacks had also left, describing such a pace of migration as more consistent with the advent of “widespread disease, mass natural disasters or large scale civil conflict.”
Yesterday, the same organisation said that it was wrong to present crimes against white people as racially motivated, adding that black people were far more likely to be targeted from what is an unacceptably high crime rate.
Ronnie Mamoepa, spokesman for South Africa's Home Affairs Ministry, said the Canadian move was preposterous. “It would have been courteous for the Canadian authorities to contact the South African government to verify this case,” he told reporters. “The allegations are as preposterous as they are laughable.”
The South African government was directly criticised in the ruling for affirmative action and black economic empowerment policies which, although “there is an explanation for them, are discriminatory”.
Race relations in South Africa are again under scrutiny. with many people arguing the country has gone backwards since the heady days of Nelson Mandela’s inauguration of the Rainbow Nation. Last week, an ANC youth leader said whites were notable by their absence when controversial gold medal winner Caster Semenya, whose gender has been questioned, was given a heroine’s welcome at Johannesburg airport.
“If it was rugby they would have been here,” said Julius Malema, President of the Youth League.
Source:The times
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