Download Internment in a global context

The Bigger Picture:
Internment in a Global
Context
The Bigger Picture
Acknowledgements
This source collection
is made by Chris Rowe
with the Heather
Campbell.
This collection is part
of the unit “Internment
without a trial:
Examples from the
Nazi and Soviet
regimes” that is
developed in the MultiFacetted Memory
project.
More information
www.euroclio.eu/multifacetted-memory
Internment has been used against many different targets. Some
people belonged to groups that were seen as a threat. on racial or
religious grounds. Some groups and individuals were interned as
punishment for acts of resistance; or because of the acts of ‘terror’
they might commit; or because their ideas were seen as
dangerous. There were also wide variations in the extent of
mistreatment and suffering of prisoners. At one extreme,
internment led to brutal treatment and mass killing; at the other
extreme, internment or forced labour might mean harassment and
rough treatment before being released. Some prisoners of war
were treated fairly, for example, while others were viciously
mistreated and many died. The common experience was that
those interned were caught in the grip of bureaucratic terror,
imprisoned by a faceless ‘system’, either without trial or after a
‘mock trial’ with a predetermined outcome. There was no
possibility of justice because being innocent was no defence..
Origins
The practice of excluding, imprisoning and requiring forced labour
from groups and individuals perceived as enemies or potential
threats to security reaches far back into history – the use of
prisoners as galley slaves on the warships of the Roman Empire is
just one example. In the nineteenth century, the autocratic
government of Tsarist Russia established penal colonies in faraway
Siberia for the detention in ‘internal exile’ of political prisoners. The
French Second Empire of Napoleon III set up a similar place of
detention and exile on Devil’s Island in the Caribbean colony of
French Guyana; this continued to function under the democratic
rule of the Third Republic after 1871. During the South African War
of 1899 to 1902, the British authorities established concentration
camps for the internment of civilians loyal to the Boer forces.
During the First World War, there were huge numbers of prisoners
of war held in prison camps in all the belligerent countries; similar
camps were set up to house ‘enemy aliens’ deemed to be
potentially disloyal to the host country. By the end of the conflict in
1918, many precedents had been set for the future.
Roman warship (Vatican Museum)
The slaves who rowed Roman galleys were ‘out of sight, out of mind’ – unseen below
decks. They were often prisoners of war or criminals. Kept in brutal conditions. many
died through overwork and exhaustion. (Public Domain)
Graveyard in the French penal colony of Devil’s Island in French Guyana.
The prison camp at Devil’s Island was first established by the Second Empire in 1852. It
was used to keep political prisoners in ‘internal exile’ far away from France in a location
from which it was impossible to escape; and very difficult to keep any contact with
friends or family at home. (Photo: Will Jones)
Siberian penal colony. Exiles in Siberia 1905
The Tsarist Empire in Russia frequently sent political prisoners and ‘unreliable’ people
to Siberia (International Institute of Social History, BG A44/225)
Shackling prisoners at Katorga in Siberia
Painting by Aleksander Sochaczewski (Public Domain)
The Second Boer War, 1899-1902
British internment camp near Cape Town 1901 (Public Domain)
Deportation of Armenians by forces of the Ottoman Empire, Kharperth April
1915
(Public Domain)
Internment in Canada WW1
About 8000 people were placed in internment camps in Western Canada during the
First World War, including Ukrainians (G.W.H. Millican Collection)
German civilians interned in Australia during WW1
(Dubotzki Collection, National Library of Australia)
Remembering the wartime betrayal of democratic values
Memorial to Canadian Ukrainians at Eaton internment camp. (SriMesh / CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Totalitarian regimes
Totalitarian ideologies were strengthened by the First World War.
Communist dictatorship ruled the Soviet Union; Fascist regimes
were established in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany; a
military dictatorship controlled the Empire of Japan. All these
regimes established systems of internment camps as a means of
repression and the isolation of racial and political ‘enemies of the
state’. These systems of repression reached a peak of intensity
during the Second World War, inflicting hardship , dehumanisation
and death upon millions of victims.
In their fight against totalitarianism during the Second World War,
democratic states resorted to the methods of internment and
isolation, as they had done in the First World War: Britain and the
Commonwealth countries opened (or re-opened) camps; in the
United States paranoia about possible ‘enemies within’ led to many
thousands of Japanese Americans being interned in camps
throughout western America. Such camps sere much less horrific
than the worst excesses of totalitarian regimes but were often an
embarrassing betrayal of democratic values.
Building Communism: Leon Trotsky
and the Civil war in Russia 1918
In 1918, Leon Trotsky, the military dictator of
the Bolshevik war effort in the Russian civil
warm advocated the use of concentration
camps against the ‘enemies of the revolution’.
Trotsky had been interned himself, by the
Tsarist authorities, and he was familiar with the
use of concentration camps by the British
during the Second Boer War of 1899-1902.
In 1918, Leon Trotsky, the military dictator of
the Bolshevik war effort in the Russian civil
warm advocated the use of concentration
camps against the ‘enemies of the revolution’.
Trotsky had been interned himself, by the
Tsarist authorities, and he was familiar with the
use of concentration camps by the British
during the Second Boer War of 1899-1902.
The photo shows Leon Trotsky in his military
uniform walking with soldiers (Public Domain)
Italian flag over Rab concentration camp 1942
From 1923, Mussolini’s Fascist regime established internment camps to hold political
prisoners. From 1940 the system of camps was greatly expanded, both within Italy and
in occupied territories in Greece and Yugoslavia. (Unknown / CC-BY-SA 3.0)
The Gulag: building the Belamor Canal to connect the White Sea with the
Baltic, 1932
The Stalinist regime in the USSR established a vast network of labour camps across
Siberia. One of the early examples of forced labour on a massive scale was the Belamor
Canal. (Copyright unknown, from the 1932 documentary film, Baltic to White Sea Water
Way.)
Jasenovac: the camp run by the Ustase – the Croatian Fascist militia led by
Ante Pavelic
The south entrance of the Jasenovac brickworks, 1941 (Donja Gradina Memorial
Association)
Stanley camp, Hong Kong
Stanley jail in British Hong Kong was taken over by the occupying Japanese forces in
1942 and used as an internment camp (COFEPOW – Children of Far East Prisoners of
War)
Forced labour: Australian prisoners of war building the Burma Railway
(Australian War Memorial, P00406.034, Public Domain)
‘Comfort Women’: Female forced labour in the system of brothels established to serve
Japanese soldiers during the Pacific War, 1942-45. (No known copyright restrictions)
Internment in wartime by democratic governments: France 1939
Camp Gurs, an internment camp near Pau in south-western France, was opened in
1939 by the democratic government of the Third Republic to hold refugees who had
fled into France after the defeat of Catalonia in the Spanish Civil War. After the Fall of
France in 1940m the pro-Fascist Vichy regime under Marshal Petain took over the camp
and used it to detain Jews of nationalities other than French. (No known copyright
restrictions)
Japanese American internees at Heart Mountain, near Cody in Wyoming 1945
The perimeter fence at Buchenwald (AP photo/George and Frank C. Hirahara
Collection, WSU Libraries)
Japanese Americans interned during WW2
(Public Domain)
Since the Second World War
The regimes of Nazi Germany Imperial Japan were destroyed in
1945; Soviet Russia was to some extent liberalised after Stalin’s
death in 1953 and the Gulag was gradually abandoned. But the
methods of internment lived on. Colonial powers such as Britain,
France and the Netherlands used internment camps against
nationalist rebels; so did Communist China under Mao Zedong and
the extreme regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia. Similar methods were
employed by the military dictatorships of Chile and Argentina in
their ‘Dirty Wars’ of the 1970s; by the United States and its allies in
the ‘War on Terror’ from 2001; and by the government of Sri Lanka
in its bitter civil war against Tamils between 2004 and 2009.
Colonial repression: France in Algeria
French troops in Algeria 1957. (Yahya, Harun. The Winter of Islam and the Spring to
Come)
Implementation of bureaucratic terror
Khmer Rouge internment camp Cambodia under Pol Pot (Documentation Center of
Cambodia)
’Dirty Wars’: Argentina under the military dictatorship
Plaza del Mayo Buenos Aires
Memorial to the ‘Disappeared Ones’ 2004 (WikiLaurent / CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Bosniak prisoners interned at camp near Prijedor 1992
(Photo by Marleen Daniels/Gamma)
The ‘War on
Terror’
Terror suspects
being processed on
arrival at Camp X
Ray, Guantanamo
Bay in Cuba, January
2002
(Public Domain)
Sri Lanka’s Civil War, 2004-2009
An internment camp for Tamil prisoners (Sentinel Project)
This collection is part of the unit
“Internment without a trial:
Examples from the Nazi and Soviet
regimes”
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