Everything about Interned totally explained
Internment is the imprisonment or confinement of people, commonly in large groups, without trial. The
Oxford English Dictionary (1989) gives the meaning as "The action of ‘interning’; confinement within the limits of a country or place". Most modern usage is about individuals, and there's a distinction between
internment, which is being confined usually for preventative or political reasons, and
imprisonment, which is being closely confined as a punishment for crime.
"Internment" also refers to the practice of
neutral countries in time of
war in detaining belligerent
armed forces and equipment in their territories under the
Second Hague Convention.
Early civilizations such as the
Assyrians used forced resettlement of populations as a means of controlling territory, but it wasn't until much later in the late 19th and the 20th centuries that records exist of groups of civilian non-combatants being concentrated into large prison camps.
Internment camps
An internment camp is a large
detention center created for
political opponents,
enemy aliens, people with
mental illness, specific
ethnic or
religious groups,
civilians of a critical
war-zone, or other groups of people, usually during a war. The term is used for facilities where inmates are selected according to some specific criteria, rather than individuals who are
incarcerated after
due process of law fairly applied by a
judiciary.
As a result of the mistreatment of
civilians interned during recent conflicts, the
Fourth Geneva Convention was established in 1949 to provide for the protection of civilians during times of war "in the hands" of an enemy and under any occupation by a foreign power. It was ratified by 194 nations.
Prisoner-of-war camps are internment camps intended specifically for holding members of an enemy's
armed forces as defined in the
Third Geneva Convention, and the treatment of whom is specified in that Convention.
Concentration camps
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), 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. 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 can't provide them with supplies or information.
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. 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, isn't 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.
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.
List of camps
Further Information
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