A white South African man has been granted refugee status in Canada after successfully arguing his life would be in danger if he returned home because of his skin colour, in a case which has infuriated the ruling African National Congress.
Brandon Huntley, 31, from Cape Town, fled to Canada where his sister lives last April. He told immigration officials he had been attacked seven times by black South Africans who called him a “white dog” and a “settler”.
Last Thursday, an Immigration Board in Ottawa ruled that his “fear of prosecution by African South Africans” was justified.
William Davis, the only member of the board, ruled the 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, who also 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.”
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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 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 government and the ANC slammed Canada’s decision as racist, saying it perpetuated false stereotypes that black people attacked white people, whereas both were 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 struck a chord with many whites, who say 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 football 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.
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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 some four million had left the country since 1994.
It added, however, that many educated blacks had also left.
It described such a pace of migration as more consistent with the advent of “widespread disease, mass natural disasters or large scale civil conflict.”
Ronnie Mamoepa, spokesman for the Home Affairs Ministry, slammed the Canadian move as 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”.
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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 hero’s welcome at Johannesburg airport.
“If it was rugby they would have been here,” said Julius Malema, President of the Youth League.