White crosses shown by US President Not Graves, says the person who founded them

The man who organized a representation of white crosses in South Africa, of which a statue was shown by Donald Trump on Wednesday, said that the American president was wrong when he described it as a “cemetery”.

Rob Hatson said that the crosses on the road in the province of Kwazulu-Natal were placed as a memorial for a few killed on their farm in 2020.

During a sometimes tense meeting in the White House, Trump showed his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, a video of the crosses to strengthen his argument that white farmers were the target.

While recognized in his country, Ramaphosa rejected the idea that the Afrikaner was systematically killed.

“These are cemeteries … more than 1,000 white farmers and … those cars do not drive, they are stopped there to express respect to their family member who was murdered,” Trump said as the video played in the Oval Office.

Hatson, a 46-year-old farmer, said that although he had no problem with the video that was used without his knowledge, Trump was known to “exaggerate” and he liked the record entitled to the striking image.

“It is not a cemetery, but it was a memorial. It was not a permanent memorial that was founded. It was a temporary memorial,” he said.

The crosses were set up to mark the death of Glen and Vida Rafferty, 63 and 60, who were the neighbors of Mr. Hatson and were killed on their farm in August 2020.

Two men were convicted of their murder in 2022.

The monument consisted of more than 2500 white crosses that stretched along both sides of a road near the farm of the pair. It has been removed since then.

“But the big problem here is not real whether it is a cemetery or if it is a memorial,” Mr. Hatson told the BBC and started talking about the murders of white farmers who called them “unacceptable” and “unnecessary”.

When asked how he thought that President Trump behaved in the meeting, he said: “I think Trump has placed the facts … at the foot of Ramaphosa and asked him to respond to them.

“And I thought the reaction was somewhat pathetic. There was no response.

“So when President Ramaphosa said (last night) that he had never heard of it, he had never seen it, you know, it was specifically tackled from him. I don’t buy that. I don’t believe that.”

In the Oval Office, Ramaphosa said that there was ‘crime in our country’ and added that “people who are killed by criminal activities are not just white people, the majority of them are black people”.

South Africa does not release racing-based crime figures, but the latter number appears that nearly 10,000 people were murdered in the country between October and December 2024. Of these, a dozen were killed at farm attacks and one of the 12 was a farmer, while five farm residents and four employees were probably black.

Some Afrikaner activists have celebrated Trump’s comments on Ramaphosa and said it has posted “the Farm Murder Crisis on the international agenda”.

But leading Afrikaner-political columnist Pieter du Tit, said what happened the result of “months and years of exaggeration, hyperbool and wrong information introduced by various South African activists in the American right-wing ecosystem”.