Internment
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. defines concentration camp as: a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the South African war of 1899-1902; one for the internment of political prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organized by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during the war of 1939-45.
Although similar camps existed earlier (such as the US Concentration Camps forced on Cherokee and other Native Americans in the 1830s, Cuba (1868–78), the Philippines (1898–1901) by the Spanish and Americans respectively[5]), the English term "concentration camp" was first used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa during the 1899-1902 Second Boer War[6]. Purportedly conceived as a form of humanitarian aid to the families whose farms had been destroyed in the fighting, the camps were used to confine and control large numbers of civilians as part of a scorched earth tactic.
At the time that Kitchener started the concentration camps in South Africa the war had entered the guerilla phase and set battles during which farms could be destroyed no longer happened. By destroying crops, livestock and farmsteads under the 'Scorched Earth' policy the Boer fighters were deprived of supplies and shelter.It also left the women and children on such farms destitute and they were forcibly removed, against their will, to the camps where thousands died of disease and starvation.
Use of the word concentration comes from the idea of concentrating a group of people who are in some way undesirable in one place, where they can be watched by those who incarcerated them. For example, in a time of insurgency, potential supporters of the insurgents are placed where they cannot provide them with supplies or information, a modern example of which is the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
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Nazi and Soviet camps
The term concentration camp lost some of its original meaning after Nazi concentration camps were discovered, and has ever since been understood to refer to a place of mistreatment, starvation, forced labour, and murder. The expression since then has only been used in this extremely pejorative sense; no government or organization has used it to describe its own facilities, using instead terms such as internment camp, resettlement camp, detention facility, etc, regardless of the actual circumstances of the camp, which can vary a great deal.
In the 20th century the arbitrary internment of civilians by the state became more common and reached a climax with Nazi concentration camps and the practice of genocide in Nazi extermination camps, and with the Gulag system of forced labor camps of the Soviet Union[7]. As a result of this trend, the term "concentration camp" carries many of the connotations of "extermination camp" and is sometimes used synonymously. A concentration camp, however, is not by definition a death-camp. For example, many of the slave labor camps were used as cheap or free sources of factory labor for the manufacture of war materials and other goods.
Indeed, in terming their camps "concentration camps," the Nazis were using a mundane term to mask something far more horrific than the word had previously meant, similar to their usage of the term 'Ghetto.' Previously, ghettos had been separate, usually walled-in Jewish Quarters designed to segregate Jews from outside society and "protect" them from their neighbors. The Ghettos in occupied Europe were far more brutal, however.
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Continued use
Although the term "concentration camp" has become virtually indistinguishable from "death camp" in the popular mind, the two are not identical. The British continued to use the term concentration camp in its original meaning long after the collapse of the Third Reich, with quite possibly the last being the forced but relatively peaceful relocation of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese squatters from the edge of the Malayan Jungle to "New Villages" during the Malayan Emergency to choke supply and support off for the Malayan Communist Party.[citation needed] The Guantanamo Bay detention camp, although technically a concentration camp in its original sense, is only referred to as such by entities outside US influence, such as Cuba[8].
On 1971 the British government introduced imprisonment without trial in Northern Ireland. 342 men the majority of whom were Roman Catholic were interred mainly in the Maze prison.
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List of camps
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See also
- Civilian Internee
- List of concentration and internment camps
- Prisoner-of-war camp
- Extermination camp
- Labor camps
- Quasi-criminal
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References
- ^ per Oxford Universal Dictionary, 1st edition 1933.
- ^ The Second Hague Convention, 1907
- ^ Laws of Hammurabi
- ^ Full text of 4th Geneva Convention
- ^ The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.
- ^ Documents re camps in Boer War
- ^ documents relative to Gulags
- ^ Cuba calls Guantanamo 'concentration camp'
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