The first group of white South Africans selected for resettlement in the United States was set to fly out of Johannesburg on Sunday evening (local time), South Africa’s transport ministry said.

US President Donald Trump’s offer to grant refugee status to white Afrikaners, mainly descendants of Dutch settlers who he says face “racial discrimination” in South Africa, has heightened tensions between the two nations.

Last week, Pretoria expressed “concerns” at the news that the US had started “processing alleged refugees”, reiterating that “allegations of discrimination are unfounded”.

South African transport ministry spokesman Collen Msibi said 49 individuals were set to leave from Johannesburg’s main airport on a chartered flight at 8pm.

“The application for the permit [to land] said it’s the Afrikaners who are relocating to the USA as refugees,” he said. The flight was bound for Washington’s Dulles International airport and then to Texas, he added.

He said his department had not received any other application for further resettlement flights.

Relations between South Africa and the United States have nose-dived this year over a range of domestic and foreign policy issues, culminating in Washington’s expulsion of Pretoria’s ambassador in March.

‘Politically motivated’

One point of dispute is a land expropriation law meant to redress inequalities entrenched under the former apartheid system. Trump has claimed it would allow the South African government “to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”.

Trump said in March that any South African farmer seeking to “flee” would have a “rapid pathway” to US citizenship, despite halting all other refugee arrivals to the US immediately after taking office in January.

South Africa’s foreign ministry said the resettlement of Afrikaners “under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy”.

It would, however, “not block citizens who seek to depart the country from doing so”, it added.

White South Africans, who make up 7.3% of the population, generally enjoy a higher standard of living than the black majority of the country.

Mainly Afrikaner-led governments imposed the brutal race-based apartheid system that denied the black majority political and economic rights until it was voted out in 1994.

-Agence France-Presse