Ambassador ‘no longer welcome’ in US after think-tank comments

Washington: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared that South Africa’s ambassador “is no longer welcome” in the United States, in the latest Trump administration move targeting the African nation.

Rubio, in a post on X, accused Ebrahim Rasool of being a “race-baiting politician” who hates President Donald Trump and America, and declared the South African diplomat “persona non grata”.

Marco Rubio described Ebrahim Rasool (pictured) as a “race-baiting politician”.Credit: nna\NPearson

Neither Rubio, who posted as he was flying back to Washington from a Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers meeting in Canada, nor the State Department gave any immediate explanation for the decision.

But Rubio linked to a Breitbart story about a talk Rasool gave earlier on Friday as part of a South African think-tank’s webinar, in which he spoke about actions taken by the Trump administration in the context of a United States where white people soon would no longer be in the majority.

Declaring Rasool persona non grata means the Trump administration will refuse to engage with him, and it could force him to leave the country or spur his government to recall him.

The diplomatic episode is the latest in a bitter, racially charged feud between the two countries, spurred in part by Trump’s South African-born billionaire adviser Elon Musk, who has spread the conspiracy theory of a “genocide” against South Africa’s White farmers.

Marco Rubio in the Oval Office with Donald Trump.Credit: AP

Both Trump and Musk have also criticised South Africa’s Black-led government over a new land law they claim discriminates against white people.

It is highly unusual for the US to expel a foreign ambassador, although lower-ranking diplomats are more frequently targeted with persona non grata status.

At the height of US-Russia diplomatic expulsions during the Cold War, neither Washington nor Moscow saw fit to expel the respective ambassadors, nor did they do so over Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, allegations of interference in the 2016 US election or the 2018 poisoning of a former Russian intelligence officer in Britain.

Phone calls to the South African embassy seeking comment, made at the end of the workday, were not answered, but on X, a South African foreign ministry spokesman posted: “We have noted the tweet by the US Secretary of State Mr Marco Rubio. We will engage through the diplomatic channel.”

Donald Trump and Elon Musk at the White House on Tuesday.Credit: AP

New Zealand recalled its High Commissioner to Britain, Phil Goff, earlier this month after comments he made at a think-tank event in London questioning Trump’s understanding of World War II history.

Rasool previously served as South Africa’s ambassador to the US from 2010 to 2015 before returning to the post in January, giving his credentials to Joe Biden in the final weeks of his presidency.

As a child, Rasool and his family were evicted from a Cape Town neighbourhood designated for white people. Rasool became an anti-apartheid campaigner, serving time in prison for his activism and identifying as a comrade of the country’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela. He later became a politician in Mandela’s African National Congress political party.

In Friday’s webinar, Rasool, speaking by videoconference, talked in academic language of the Trump administration’s crackdowns on diversity and equity programs and immigration.

“The supremacist assault on incumbency, we see it in the domestic politics of the USA, the MAGA movement – the Make America Great Again movement – as a response not simply to a supremacist instinct, but to very clear data that shows great demographic shifts in the USA in which the voting electorate in the USA is projected to become 48 per cent white,” the South African ambassador said.

He pointed to Musk’s outreach to far-right figures in Europe, calling it a “dog whistle” in a global movement trying to rally people who see themselves as part of an “embattled white community”.

Rasool made no pointed attack on Trump and instead offered tips for dealing with his administration, saying: “This is not a moment to antagonise the United States” and “Let’s avoid things that cock a snoot at the United States”.

His ouster comes after Trump signed an executive order that cut aid and assistance to the Black-led South African government. In the order, Trump said South Africa’s Afrikaners, who are descendants of mainly Dutch colonial settlers, were being targeted by a new law that allows the government to expropriate private land.

The South African government has denied its new law is tied to race and says Trump’s claims over the country and the law have been full of misinformation and distortions.

Trump said land was being expropriated from Afrikaners, when no land has been taken under the law. It allows the government to take land in specific instances where it is not being used, or where it would be in the public interest if it is redistributed, and aims to address some of the wrongs of South Africa’s racist apartheid era, when Black people had land taken away from them.

Trump also announced a plan to offer Afrikaners refugee status in the US. They are only one part of South Africa’s white minority.

Musk, who heads Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, has highlighted the land law in social media posts and cast it as a threat to South Africa’s white minority.

Musk earlier this month also targeted South Africa’s government over business decisions, saying in a post on X that it had opted not to do business with his Starlink “because I’m not black”.

AP, Bloomberg

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