AfriForum can’t spot the irony in its own whiny argument

When I heard that AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel said apartheid was not a crime against humanity, I found it ironic that he also never publicly dispelled the false international narrative of a “white genocide” in South Africa.

See, Kriel was looking at the actual definition of a crime against humanity and weighed it against one of the biggest atrocities in the world’s history: not African slavery, but the Holocaust.

According to Kriel, only 600 people were killed by apartheid police.

Not certain where he gets his stats from, but he said: “In the ’80s and early ’90s, people died during the people’s war conducted by the ANC.”

He continued to justify his statement: “There were never mass killings of people under apartheid as we saw under communism when the Jews were killed. When you speak about a concept of apartheid as a crime against humanity, I see mass killings. That did not happen under apartheid.”

Let us not forget, AfriForum is not a “civil rights union”. It is an interest group and its interests are to preserve the Afrikaans language, culture and fight for the interests of white people and their privilege.

Well, Kriel, we do not see mass killings of white people in South Africa by Africans.

It baffles me that he did not explain to the world what an actual genocide is. Why did he keep quiet when it was revealed last month that right-wing organisation Suidlanders had orchestrated this “white genocide” campaign, the ideas of which spread to Australia and the US, to gain international support for white South Africans?

While Kriel and his deputy, Ernst Roets, were flying around the world to gain international support on the issue of fighting expropriation of land without compensation, they should have explained to US President Donald Trump’s national security adviser John Robert Bolton that the average black South African is more concerned about securing a job to feed his or her family than finding a white farmer to kill.

Kriel should gather his “Black Monday” brigade to explain that the UN’s definition of genocide spells out exactly what the apartheid government did to blacks: “Genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

But my white Afrikaans friend and colleague reminded me AfriForum is like a “whining child”.

“It complains about selective things that serve its selective interests, and only when it suits it.

“Instead of aiming towards equality, it generates a bigger divide by failing to accept that apartheid was a crime against humanity.”

Rorisang Kgosana