ISTANBUL

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Monday that white Afrikaners who are being "enticed" to go to the US, "do not fit the definition of a refugee."

Speaking at a presidential panel alongside his Rwandan and Mauritanian counterparts at the Africa CEO Forum in Ivory Coast's city of Abidjan, Ramaphosa said a refugee is someone who is forced to flee their country due to political, religious, or economic persecution.

He said his country is the only one in Africa where the colonizers stayed, and that "we have never driven them out of our country."

Afrikaners are a white ethnic minority who are primarily descendants of Dutch, German, and French settlers who arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 and ruled South Africa during the brutal apartheid regime of racial segregation, which frequently resulted in the violent repression of Black South Africans until 1994.

In a Feb. 7 executive order, US President Donald Trump directed authorities to begin resettling Afrikaner refugees, describing the group as "victims of unjust racial discrimination."

According to recent reports, the first white South African refugees are expected to arrive in the US this week.

Ramaphosa said he spoke with Trump by phone to refute those allegations. "What you've been told by those people who are opposed to transformation back home in South Africa is not true."

He added that during his conversation with Trump, he expressed a desire to visit the US for further discussion of the matter.

The South African leader said his country is the only African country where the colonizers came to stay, adding: “We have never driven them out of our country.

“It's a fringe grouping that does not have a lot of support, that is anti-transformation and anti-change, that would actually prefer to see South Africa going back to apartheid type policies.”

Ramaphosa underlined that the Afrikaners headed to the US are not being “persecuted, hounded, treated badly.”

“They are leaving ostensibly because they don't want to embrace the changes that are taking place in our country in accordance with our constitution,” he added.

Trump also issued an executive order in February reducing US financial assistance to South Africa.

The order expressed concern regarding the country's land expropriation policy, support for a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and growing ties with Iran.