Reuters has verified that images Trump presented to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa were not bodies of dead South African farmers, but were in fact screenshots from a Reuters video from February in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The still images Trump claimed were white farmers actually showed video footage of humanitarian workers moving body bags in the Congolese city of Goma, following battles with Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.
Reuters’ video journalist Djaffar Al Katanty said he was shocked to see Trump share his images that showed a mass burial, which was very difficult to obtain after negotiating with the rebels and the International Committee of the Red Cross to allow entry.
“In view of all the world, President Trump used my image, used what I filmed in DRC to try to convince President Ramaphosa that in his country, white people are being killed by Black people,” Al Katanty said.
Ramaphosa was ambushed in the Oval Office this week while trying to defend against the persistent right wing conspiracy theory that a genocide was taking place against white minority farmers in South Africa.
Trump put on a show, dimming the lights to show a video that he claimed showed evidence of genocide, and flipping through printed copies of articles he falsely claimed documented murders of white South Africans, saying “death, death, death, horrible death”.
