South African couple beg to stay in Australia amid fears of racial violence back home: ‘Our death sentence’

A couple face an anxious wait to see if they will be kicked out of Australia and forced to return to South Africa where they fear they will be targeted for being white.

Charné-Lee Gunning, 31, and her fiancé Ivan Strauss, 37, arrived in Australia on visitor visas in December 2018 after fleeing South Africa.

The western Sydney couple are pleading with the federal government not to deport them as they wait for their protection visas to be approved.

If their application is rejected, they will have just five weeks to leave Australia and return to South Africa, where they will have nothing to go back to.

The couple also fear they will be racially targeted and their lives at risk if they return.

With Mr Strauss’ skills as an air conditioning technician highly sought after, they’re willing to relocate anywhere in order to stay.

‘We feel safe here, I can’t begin to explain how grateful we are to be here,’ Ms Gunning told Sky News.

‘I feel like that would be our death sentence, especially with what’s going on in South Africa at the moment. It has gotten a lot worse since we left.’

Charné-Lee Gunning and her fiance Ivan Strauss are desperate to remain in Australia

The pair were both exposed to terrifying violence during their childhoods.

Ms Gunning was just three years old when her father was fatally shot in the head.

A few years later, intruders tried to break into the granny flat she shared with her mother at a farm in the KwaZulu-Natal province.

‘They were threatening what they were going to do to us when they got through the window. It was of a sexual nature,’ she recalled.

Mr Strauss and his family were also subjected to violence, including a terrifying incident where he and his father were held up by two armed men.

The couple were also forced off the road while driving a motorbike through Pinetown in 2016.

‘You have to watch your back the whole time. When we came to Australia, the simple thing of just driving with a window open is amazing,’ Mr Strauss said.

‘You can’t do that back in South Africa.’

Ms Gunning (pictured as a baby) was raised by her mother after her father (also pictured) was fatally shot in the head

His fiancée added: ‘The nightmares are still there but I have a sense of safety here that I’ve never had before.’

The couple applied for protection visas shortly after they arrived in Australia but were denied.

They have since appealed and are waiting for the Administrative Review Tribunal to decide their fate.

‘We will move anywhere in Australia, even most remote place, where skills needed, we will go there,’ Ms Gunning said.

A Department of Home Affairs spokesperson said that it will not comment on individual cases for privacy reasons.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump fast-tracked visas for white South African farmers, claiming they were victims of ‘genocide’ – a claim fiercely rejected by South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa.

‘It’s a genocide taking place that you people don’t want to write about,’ President Trump said at the time.

‘Farmers are being killed, they happen to be white but whether they are white or black it makes no difference to me.’

But in a televised meeting at the White House, President Ramaphosa denied white farmers were being specifically targeted.

‘People who do get killed, unfortunately through criminal activity, are not only white people, majority of them are black people,’ he said.

The debate has now turned to whether Australia should follow the US lead and regard white South Africans as refugees from violence.

Shadow Immigration Minister Paul Scarr said whites making claims of racial vicitimisation should be assessed the same way as anyone else making such an application.

‘It is important that the laws are applied the same way across people seeking asylum or humanitarian visas from anywhere in the world,’ he said.