Taken from somewhere else :
"Let’s keep it brutally simple and 100% consistent with the exact legal definition of genocide that Solly himself posted from the 1948 Genocide Convention. For anything to be genocide, you need one or more of the prohibited acts plus proven specific intent to destroy a racial, ethnic, national or religious group in whole or in part, as such.
Apartheid involved forced removals, killings, serious harm – nobody denies that. Yet no international court, no UN resolution, and not even the ANC government in its prosecutions and TRC process has ever established that the National Party’s intent was the physical or biological destruction of black people as a group. The proven intent was racial domination and separate development, not extermination. That is why apartheid is universally classified as a crime against humanity, not genocide.
Now take post-1994 farm attacks. Legally it’s the same story: killings and serious harm happen, but no court, no commission, no UN body has ever found state policy or coordinated intent to wipe out whites, Afrikaners or Boers as a group. Court-proven motives remain robbery, greed, and sometimes individual racial hatred – never the special intent required for genocide.
So strictly by the law Solly quoted, neither apartheid nor farm murders qualify as genocide. The intent element is missing in both.
But here’s where the legal definition and lived reality part ways. In the isolated rural farming districts where neighbours live hours apart, every torture and murder is personally known, every crime scene visited by the same small circle of people. When a farmer is killed, that farm usually stands empty or gets sold – almost never to another commercial farmer willing to take the risk.
One by one the scattered rural population shrinks. Families emigrate, children refuse to come back, entire districts lose the people who produce food and keep small towns alive. To the few who remain, watching their community visibly disappear year after year, “genocide” – however technically inaccurate – becomes the only word strong enough to describe the slow, irreversible erasure of their entire way of life. Perception becomes its own lived reality, even when the outside world correctly says the legal threshold isn’t met.
You can dismiss the word, but you can’t dismiss that slow vanishing. And those who live it will keep using the strongest language they have, because from where they sit, watching the last lights go out on farms that have been in families for generations, it certainly feels like the end of their people in those places – intent or no intent."