Apology to AfriForum and Solidarity
In the November 17 edition of Sunday World, we published an opinion piece under the headline “Moegoe”, in which we criticised AfriForum as the moegoe of the week. In the piece, we stated as a fact that an apartheid flag was flown high during the Bela march, which was organised by Solidarity, AfriForum and many Afrikaans groups in Pretoria.
The piece was crafted after some organisations, including Cosatu, stated that an apartheid flag was flown at the protest after they saw a man, in the build-up to the event, carrying a large Vierkleur flag. AfriForum and Solidarity filed a complaint with the Office of the Ombudsman, saying that there was no apartheid flag flown at the event.
The Deputy Ombudsman, Franz Krüger, ruled in favour of AfriForum and Solidarity and ordered the paper to apologise. He ruled that the Vierkleur, though associated with colonialism and right-wing groups, was not “the apartheid flag”, which is generally understood to be the flag in use just before 1994, and accepted evidence that the person with the flag was turned away from the event.
Krüger dismissed several complaints lodged by AfriForum and Solidarity against Sunday World, including a separate complaint from AfriForum in which they claimed that we fabricated the lobby group’s quotes. Sunday World apologises to AfriForum and Solidarity for the embarrassment and the inconvenience the piece may have caused.
The full ruling is available at
https://presscouncil.org.za/2025/01/14/afriforum-vs-sunday-world-2-and-solidarity-vs-sunday-world/
