Far-right MEPs nominate Afrikaner militants for prestigious Sakharov Prize

AfriForumAfriForum, a South African organisation championing the country’s white Afrikaner minority community, and notably white farmers, has been proposed as a candidate for the European Parliament’s prestigious yearly Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by members of the assembly’s Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group, a pan-European alliance of parliamentarians from far- and hard-right parties, mostly made up of France’s Rassemblement National (the former Front National).

The Sakharov Prize, named in honour of the late Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, was first established in 1988 when it was awarded to the late South African civil rights champion and later president, Nelson Mandela. In the European Parliament’s official presentation of the prize, it is intended “to reward human rights activists and dissidents all over the world” and is awarded to those “who have made an exceptional contribution to the fight for human rights”.

Mediapart has seen the list of the eight nominees for the 2018 prize attribution, which included the ENF's proposal of AfriForum. The list will be officially announced on September 27th.

Officials from AfriForum, which describes itself as an NGO representing South African minority communities, toured Britain and the United States earlier this year – where they notably met with President Donald Trump’s security advisor John Bolton – to lobby support for its campaign defending white farmers, or Boers, who it claims are being discriminated against and murdered, hinting at official collusion.

The organisation was given a boost in August when Trump took to Twitter to announce he had asked his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “to closely study land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale [sic] killing of farmers”. The message prompted high tension in relations between Washington and Pretoria.

Contacted by Mediapart, he co-president of the ENF group, French Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Nicolas Bay, a senior figure in the Rassemblement National party led by Marine Le Pen, confirmed the nomination of AfriForum. “South African farmers are repeatedly victims of assassinations and expropriations and it seemed logical to us to place the accent on this situation because there are indeed grave violations of fundamental principles,” he said. 

British MEP Janice Atkinson (formerly of the UKIP party) and her Belgian colleague Gerolf Annemans (from the far-right Flemish Vlaams Belang party), both members of the ENF group, have regularly voiced support for the Afrikaner landowners and have attempted, until now in vain, to convince the assembly to adopt an “urgent” resolution over the expropriations and deaths of Boers, what commentators such as Britain’s hard-right essayist Katie Hopkins have called “ethnic cleansing”, and alt-right US commentator Mike Cernovich “white genocide”.

But while the issue, which is developing into a major cause for many far-right groups, is little known in France, it has been seized upon by Rassemblement National MEPs. One of them, Marie-Christine Arnautu, addressed a formal written question on July 29th to the European Union (EU) High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, Italian commissioner Federica Mogherini. In it, Arnautu wrote: “Experienced farmers, the Boers have farmed land in South Africa since they settled there in the 17th century, at which time the region was only inhabited by a few nomadic tribes […] In 1994 there were 65,000 white farmers in South Africa; today there are only 35,000, with 4,000 said to have been murdered,” while also claiming that poverty in South Africa is rising fastest among the white population and that, “Tens of thousands of white people now live in shanty towns.”

“Is the High Representative contemplating any action to bring pressure to bear on the South African Government to end this discriminatory policy?” she asked the EU foreign policy chief.

Donald Trump’s August 23rd message on Twitter alleging “large scale killing of farmers” in South Africa followed the broadcast of a Fox News “exclusive” report on the treatment of white farmers, which he refers to. Trump’s tweet prompted a special report in The New York Times which observed: “The tweet gives prominence to a false narrative pushed by some right-wing groups in South Africa that there have been numerous seizures of white-owned land and widespread killings of white farmers.”

“The number of killings of farmers, including farm workers, is at a 20-year low, 47 in the fiscal year 2017-18, according to research published in July by AgriSA, a farmers’ organization in South Africa,” The New York Times added. “That is down from 66 during the fiscal year before. The figures were consistent with a steady decline of violence since a peak in 1998, when 153 were killed.”

The Trump tweet followed intense lobbying by AfriForum, along with other Afrikaner militant groups, in the US and also notably Australia. In an analysis article for The Guardian published the day after Trump’s message was posted, US-based Australian writer and journalist Jason Wilson observed that, “Trump’s tweet came at the end of a long process whereby the far-right idea of “white genocide” in South Africa had been mainstreamed, working its way from far-right websites and forums, into the rightward edge of mainstream media, and then into policy proposals.” Wilson noted the role played in relaying the theme by press baron Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, “whose outlets have played an outsized role in that process”.

The campaigns by far-right groups intensified this summer after statements by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa that he wants to change the country’s constitution to authorise expropriations of some white landowners, which would be without compensation in the case of uncultivated land. In May, his African National Congress party (ANC) issued a statement saying such expropriations were “a call to action to decisively break with the historical injustice of colonial, apartheid and patriarchal patterns of land ownership, and to build a South Africa that belongs to all”.

According to official figures, South Africa’s white population, which makes up around 8% of the country’s total population, owns 72% of farmed land, much of it inherited from the Dutch settlers who arrived four centuries ago.

Meanwhile, Mediapart has learnt that MEPs from the French far-right Rassemblement National have also proposed, this time in their own name and supported by MEPs from Hungary’s ruling hard-right Fidesz party and the Greek far-right Golden Dawn party, another candidate for the Sakharov Prize – Mary Wagner, a Canadian anti-abortion activist.  

Neither Wagner nor AfriForum have a realistic chance of winning the award for which three nominees will be short-listed by members of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs and development commissions on October 9th. Following that, the heads of the various parliamentary groups will convene to decide the winner, who will be announced on October 25th.

That person is likely to be one of those proposed by the parliament’s main political groups. The majority group, the conservative and Christian democrat European People’s Party, have nominated Ukranian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, whose opposition to Russian annexation of Crimea, where he was based, resulted his imprisonment by Russia in Siberia in 2015. The Progressive Alliance of Socialist and Democrats (S&D) and the Greens have put forward the suggestion of a joint award to NGOs involved in search and rescue operations of migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea, including SOS Méditerranée. Meanwhile, the liberal-centrist group ALDE has proposed “Caesar”, the codename identity of a former Syrian military police officer who provided photographic evidence of mass killings perpetrated by the Damas regime after his defection and flight from Syria in 2013.

The award ceremony will take place in December.

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• The French version of this article can be found here.

English version with additional reporting by Graham Tearse