President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said white South Africans who had left for the United States after being granted refugee status there were “cowardly,” in a blunt broadside as tensions over the issue mount between the countries.

“They are running away” from a duty to help with South Africa’s transformation and solve its problems, Mr. Ramaphosa told reporters on Tuesday, adding, “When you run away, you are a coward.”

More than 8,000 South Africans have expressed interest in the U.S. program to create an expedited path for Afrikaners to resettle in the United States. That comes even as the Trump administration has barred most refugees from other countries.

If approved, they would join the dozens of people who arrived on Monday at an airport outside Washington on a charter flight funded by the United States.

The program for the Afrikaners has cut to the heart of post-apartheid race dynamics in South Africa. The country’s government has strongly rejected the Trump administration’s assertion that the Afrikaners — members of a white ethnic minority that ruled during apartheid in South Africa — should be eligible for refugee status.

The Afrikaners “do not fit the definition of a refugee,” Mr. Ramaphosa said on Monday at a forum in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.