The Economic Freedom Fighters |(EFF) rejects with contempt the recently released United States State Department Human Rights Report, which shamelessly positions itself as a moral authority while engaging in the most grotesque violations of human rights both domestically and abroad. This report was clearly crafted to smear South Africa for daring to assert its sovereignty, reclaim its land, and stand in solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world, particularly the people of Palestine.
The report claims that South Africa’s human rights record has “significantly worsened” and parades a selective list of so-called abuses, pointing to the killing of over 40 criminal suspects in police operations between January and April 2024. These cases, picked from our broader struggle against violent crime, are inflated to serve Washington’s narrative that our nation is unfit to govern itself.
In a display of open political bias, the report also drags the EFF into its propaganda by referencing the singing of revolutionary songs at our rallies and absurdly claiming they “incite violence” against white farmers. It recycles unverified figures of 447 socalled “farm murders” over a year, presenting them as evidence of minority persecution, while ignoring the daily structural violence inflicted on the Black majority through poverty, landlessness, and economic exclusion.
It even criticises the Expropriation Bill of 2024, warning that our determination to take back stolen land without compensation will “disproportionately affect minorities,” as if the dispossession of millions of Black South Africans is not a significant injustice.
We see this sudden aggression from the United States for what it is: part of a longstanding imperialist playbook. The U.S. first manufactures a narrative of “human rights violations,” then uses it to justify sanctions, isolation, and even military aggression. It is the same tactic used in Iraq under the lies of “weapons of mass destruction,” which left over a million people dead while U.S. corporations looted oil fields.
It is the same ploy used in Libya, where “humanitarian intervention” destroyed a prosperous African nation and turned it into a warzone. It is the same handbook that has toppled governments across Latin America, Africa, and Asia whenever they dared to put their people’s interests before U.S. greed and power driven interests.
South Africa is being targeted because we had the courage to stand up to apartheid Israel and take them to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) while much of the world stood by in silence, while we have continued to build strong relations with nations such as Russia, Iraq, and China which the U.S declares as their enemies.
At home, we pursue vibrant, uncompromising, and radical politics, demanding the expropriation of land to return it to the dispossessed Black majority. This stance is seen as a direct threat to global white supremacy, a system for which Donald Trump now serves as the loudest spokesperson.
The U.S has no moral standing to lecture any nation on human rights. This is a country that cages migrant children in detention centres; that has rolled back reproductive rights and stripped millions of women of the freedom to control their own bodies; that was founded on the genocide and land theft of Native Americans, whose communities remain trapped in poverty without basic services; that wages war on Black people daily through police brutality, mass incarceration, and economic exclusion; and that sponsors and funds Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people, arming an apartheid state to bomb hospitals, schools, and homes in Gaza.
We reject the authority of any imperialist state to define for the world what human rights mean while it remains the single greatest violator of those rights. The EFF will not be intimidated by Washington’s attempts to delegitimise our movement, or our government.
The EFF has been accused of populism and demagoguery by some political analysts.
Pitfall Whiskers
Israel: You have two cows. You expand their farmland every year.
Boost
Fun South African Fact: Some countries have deserts; some have subtropical forests, right? South Africa has: deserts, wetlands, grasslands, bush, subtropical forests, mountains and escarpments.