Complaint to the BBC – media release by PRAAG

COMPLAINT FILED ONLINE WITH THE BBC

At the beginning of the programme and also on the BBC’s website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22554709 John Simpson states: “Apartheid South Africa looked after white people and nobody else. Now some of its white communities face a level of deprivation, or of violence, which threatens their future in the country.” The first sentence is factually incorrect because so-called “Apartheid South Africa” (National Party rule from 1948 to 1994) supplied social and educational services to all inhabitants of the country, albeit at differential rates, from budgets tabled in parliament and therefore widely available. Schools, universities for the use of non-whites were built, as well as hospitals, including the Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto where medical students from the University of the Witwatersrand also trained.

The programme and website article then establish a causal link between such “lack of care” for non-whites under the previous dispensation with the deprivation and violence currently suffered by poor whites. Or at least this is how the viewer/reader will interpret it as they are seen to be “getting their just deserts”.

Although the rest of the programme is not unsympathetic to the current plight of Afrikaners, the factual inaccuracy concerning so-called “apartheid” is but one in a general, systematic, ethnocentric bias against Afrikaners on the BBC, intended to incite world-wide hatred against an essentially powerless minority in South Africa.

END OF COMPLAINT TEXT

PRAAG, as well as Dr. Dan Roodt in his personal capacity, reserves the right to lodge further complaints against the BBC, either with the relevant bodies in South Africa or with the Council of Europe for promoting intolerance and hate speech against Afrikaners.