Tue, Apr 07, 2020 page9

• Why concentration camps are still with us — part II

  Mass internment camps are far from a thing of the past, but Britain’s Boer War concentration camps illustrate how a society can make excuses for a mass crime

  • By Daniel Trilling / The Guardian
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  When something today is described as a concentration camp, it almost always provokes an angry dispute. If camps are not being used to exterminate people, as they have been in their worst instances, then the comparison is frequently condemned as inappropriate.

  However, condemnation can be a way for governments to shield themselves from criticism of their decisions, and from criticism of the legitimacy of state power itself.

  In 2018, US President Donald Trump’s government responded to a rise in the number of undocumented migrants — many of whom were asylum seekers fleeing violence in Central America — crossing the US-Mexico border by drastically increasing the use of long-term immigration detention.

  Reports of overcrowding, filthy conditions and the denial of due process for asylum claims soon followed, accompanied by measures that seemed intended to make a symbolic display of cruelty, such as the separation of young children from their parents.

  In June last year, amid the outcry from opponents of this policy, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recorded a video for her Instagram followers.

  “The US is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are,” she said. “I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something.”

  This was a political intervention intended to shock people into challenging the Trump government’s immigration policy — and in the row that ensued, some commentators objected that Ocasio-Cortez’s reference to concentration camps and her use of the phrase “never again” was an inappropriate Holocaust analogy.

  As US historian Deborah Lipstadt said: “Something can be horrible and not be like the Holocaust.”

  However, much of the response from Ocasio-Cortez’s Republican opponents was to downplay the extent of abuses happening as a result of Trump’s policies, or to portray what was happening as normal and routine.

  Some pointed out, for instance, that Trump was only making modifications to a system built by his predecessors: Deportations of undocumented immigrants, for instance, reached their peak under former US president Barack Obama.

  These sorts of equivocations have accompanied the use of camps from their inception, and they always try to give the same impression: That what is being done is normal and legitimate; that criticisms are overblown, marginal and extreme; and that states have the right to behave this way.

  The story of Britain’s concentration camps during the Boer War illustrates how a society that thinks of itself as liberal can make excuses for a mass crime. In 1899, when the British empire went to war against two breakaway Afrikaner republics in South Africa, it set up a network of camps that quickly expanded to detain several hundred thousand people.

  At first the camps were justified as “protection” for Boer civilians who had signed an oath of loyalty; later, they were used to imprison Boer “undesirables” who had not signed the oath, as well as black South Africans who the British forced off their land to make them act as lookouts for troops.

  Due to poor sanitation, meager food rations and overcrowding, diseases such as typhoid and measles frequently ripped through the camps; at least 28,000 white people and 20,000 black people were killed by this system in just a few years.

  The two most prominent critics of Britain’s camps — feminist campaigners Emily Hobhouse and Millicent Fawcett — had to struggle against political and public opinion that initially saw the camps as a wartime necessity, and fought hard to alleviate suffering.

  However, the grounds on which they did so were radically different, as British author Vron Ware has said.

  Fawcett, who visited South Africa with the government’s approval to produce a report on the camps, saw her concern for the welfare of vulnerable civilians as compatible with the wider aims of the camps.

  “Saving the children,” for her, was “as true a service to the country as that which men were rendering by going into the armies to serve in the field.”

  For Hobhouse, who was the first prominent activist to visit South Africa and expose conditions in the camps, British military values and the nationalism that underpinned them were the fundamental problem. She was challenging the legitimacy of state power itself.

  Hobhouse, who in her day was derided in sexist terms as a “mad” old lady, is now largely forgotten in the UK, while it is safe to say that Britain’s concentration camps are not well remembered: Last year, the Conservative politician Jacob Rees-Mogg defended their use on an episode of Question Time, erroneously claiming that their mortality rate was only the same as that of Glasgow at the time.

  However, without Hobhouse’s radical critique, it would have been harder to oppose the harm done by Britain’s camps a century ago, and would be harder to understand why camps still appear in the world today.

  The point of historical comparisons should not be to find identical situations — no two events in history are identical — but to alert us to potential dangers in the way states exercise power.

  Not everyone, for instance, reacted with outrage to Ocasio-Cortez’s comments last year. While she drew criticism from some Jewish organizations, including a rebuke from the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, the row also energized a US protest movement against Trump’s immigration policy led by left-wing Jewish activists. The movement calls itself Never Again Action, explicitly drawing on a collective memory of persecution.

  In his final book, The Drowned and the Saved, Auschwitz survivor and author Primo Levi reflected on the conditions that had made the Nazi camps possible, and wondered what lessons, if any, could be applied to a world that had moved on.

  The unique combination of factors that had unleashed the horror of Nazism was unlikely to return, he said, but that should not obscure the danger of violence in our own time, or the politicians who seek to wield it.

  Violence, he wrote, “is there before our eyes ... it only awaits its new buffoon [there is no dearth of candidates] to organize it, legalize it, declare it necessary and mandatory and so contaminate the world.”

  If the state as we know it is here to stay, then what can people do when governments start building camps? The history of the concentration camp has also been a history of people’s resistance to camps, from inside and out. Even in the most seemingly hopeless situations there are stories of people who have fought back against their treatment.

  The uprisings in the Nazi death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka are among the most famous; and the Soviet Gulag system was beset by strikes and revolts. On their own, these might not have been enough, but camps work by enforcing a rigid distinction between people on opposite sides of the barbed-wire fence. Those inside are kept silent and invisible, while those outside are encouraged to ignore or accept what is happening.

  Successful resistance aims at breaking down this distinction: Governments know this, and even states that operate relatively mild forms of mass detention make significant efforts to obscure the conditions inside, and to deter their own citizens from prying too closely.

  One evening in February this year, I watched the Kurdish author Behrouz Boochani give a talk by video link to an audience at Birkbeck, University of London.

  Boochani, who lives in New Zealand, spent four years in Australia’s “regional offshore processing center” for asylum seekers on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea.

  Australia has pioneered a type of long-term detention for unwanted migrants that is becoming more common elsewhere in the world.

  Boochani and his fellow detainees were not merely being held for “processing,” but in harsh conditions intended to act as a deterrent to future travelers.

  The Australian government forbade journalists to report on the full extent of these conditions, which included the beating and abuse of detainees, and introduced a law threatening doctors and social workers with up to two years in prison if they spoke in public about what they had witnessed.

  However, Boochani smuggled out accounts of life in detention, via text messages sent to his translator by WhatsApp, that were turned into articles for the Guardian and other outlets — as well as a memoir, No Friend But the Mountains.

  Boochani told reporters how he saw his detention as part of Australia’s — and Britain’s — longer history of treating non-white people as disposable.

  “It’s worse than a prison,” he said of the Manus camp. “It’s a place where they take your identity and freedom from you, and try to destroy you.”

  Detainees were given numbers, he said, which the guards used instead of their names; his was MEG45.

  The camp on Manus Island was eventually shut down by the Australian government, after widespread public criticism, although its broader asylum policies remain largely the same.

  For Boochani, writing was not simply a way to expose his conditions and link up with campaigners against detention on the outside, but to challenge the very basis on which the treatment of people like him was justified.

  “I never use the language and the words that the [Australian] government use,” he said. “I say ‘systematic torture,’ I say ‘political prisoner.’”

  One of the things that gave him hope in confinement, he said, was the fact that animals could wander in and out of the spaces where human freedom was limited — a reminder that the structure which held him was built by people, and could therefore also be dismantled.

  “Nature,” he said, “always tried to reimpose itself on the prison.”

  This is part two of a two-part article. Part one ran in yesterday’s edition.

  Daniel Trilling is a British journalist, editor and author. He was the editor of New Humanist magazine from 2013 until last year.
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