Concentration camps

concentration camps

BRITISH COMPENSATION to BOERS was a PALTRY £9

BRITISH COMPENSATION to BOERS was a PALTRY £9 ……….
The Anglo-Boer War Concentration Camps – a new tread ………… After what that retarded British politician, Jacob Rees-Mogg said in a previous thread – where he claimed that the British Concentration camps were justified, and not so bad, and for their own good……
NOW, a NEW THREAD: ANYBODY who knows ANYTHING about the “Boer/Afrikaans” nation will KNOW that, DESPITE the fact that their husbands were away on Commando – Boer women were perfectly able and capable to run their farms, to use firearms, and to sustain and protect themselves ON THEIR FARMS. BUT, what these women could NOT DO, was to exist / subsist on their farms after the ROBERTS / KITCHENER “SCORCHED EARTH POLICY” took effect over the length and breadth of the Boer territories.
The BRITISH ARMY killed all Boer livestock and farm animals; they burnt all crops; they poisoned water wells; they set fire to the farm houses, homesteads and buildings, and burnt and destroyed all Boer furniture, belongings, heirlooms and antiques.
A British officer who witnessed the burning of a Boer farm homestead noted: “The women, in a little group, cling together, comforting each other or hiding their faces in each other’s laps”. A Boer woman declared: “There I stood, surrounded by my small children, while the cruel soldiers plundered my property. Furniture, clothing, food, everything was thrown in a heap and set alight……. Despite my pleas that I might be allowed to retain a few antiques and heirlooms, they refused to listen.”
“Over the length and breadth of our Republic they raised everything to the ground. Horses, cattle and sheep were bayoneted to death. The bellowing of the cattle, the sad bleating of the sheep and all the blood is something that we shall never forget”
THEN, as we have seen, as many of these Boer women and children as could be found and rounded up, were sent in cattle trucks, to the CONCENTRATION CAMPS – where, as we know, about 28,000 of them died. Not to mention a further 15,000 (approx. – figures vary) Blacks who ALSO died in their separate Camps. The “Scorched Earth” policy, first started by Lord Roberts, and later continued by General Kitchener, had caused the (by now) homeless Boer women and children, – i.e. those who had not yet been herded into concentration camps – to wander the open veld for the entire duration of the war, often seeking shelter in kloofs and caves, and even in the hills, without any support at all. In the Transvaal alone, by 1902, some 10,000 women and children suffered this pitiful existence. In October, 1902 Lord Alfred Milner admitted that 30,000 Boer houses had been destroyed during the war. But it was not only the farms which the British attacked. The British partially or completely destroyed at least 40 Boer towns in the two Boer republics.
AND NOW – whilst NOBODY can condone what the British did – in the name of getting their hands on the Transvaal goldfields, we must consider the BOER NATION AFTER the WAR. With most of their farms destroyed, many villages and towns damaged and destroyed, and their major cities and capitals occupied, WHAT DID THE BRITISH, as the all-conquering “victors”, DO FOR THE TWO BOER NATIONS ????? VIRTUALLY NOTHING !!!!!
After the war, the Boers made 63,000 separate claims for their losses. Britain granted the Boer Republics the sum of only £3 million as compensation for the three years of war waged against them. If one considers that the Boer population by June, 1902 was in the order of 330,000 people, then the ‘compensation’ which the British gave the Boers amounted to a paltry £9 for each man, woman and child (at least what was left of them) – hardly equitable considering their material losses, if not the total losses they suffered, as a nation. And this calculation does not even begin to have account for the Black population of the two Republics.
HOW CAN THIS BE JUSTIFIED AND EQUITABLE ?????????? NEVER !!!!!!
PS: This article and some of the figures are a small, partial extract from my research PAPER entitled: “The Anglo – Boer War, 1899 – 1902: In Numbers” by David R. Bennett © 2012. I am a South African, with 3/8th BOER Ancestry, and with a large Afrikaans family, well versed with the BOER nation, of which I am part. PHOTOS: Some photos of young VICTIMS at the hands of the British; Boer orphaned children just after the War, and the JACOBS, Durban Boer Concentration Camp Memorial – NOTE the AGES of most of the BOER CHILDREN who DIED in this camp – and it was the same for ALL the camps ……. Nothing more need be said.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/AngloBoerWar/permalink/10157070415499182/

Concentration camps in the South African War? Here are the real facts

More than a century after 48 000 people died in concentration camps in what’s known as the South African War between 1899 and 1902 – or the Anglo-Boer War – the events of that period are back in the headlines.

The camps were established by the British as part of their military campaign against two small Afrikaner republics: the ZAR (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State.

The scandalous campaign is back in the news following controversial comments by British Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg on a BBC television programme.

Rees-Mogg’s statements have caused consternation because they were riddled with inaccuracies. It’s time to set the record straight and to refute his inaccuracies one by one. I do this based on the historical research I’ve done on the South African War for the last 49 years.

READ MORE

http://theconversation.com/concentration-camps-in-the-south-african-war-here-are-the-real-facts-112006?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitterbutton

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Inside Britain’s concentration camps: Harrowing photographs reveal the plight of thousands of Afrikaners detained in disease-ridden tents during the Second Boer War

  • Most of the victims herded into the concentration camps in South Africa were women and children 
  • Unlike the Nazi camps in the Second World War, few executions took place at the British camps in South Africa
  • Instead, what ended up killing most of the Afrikaners was disease and malnutrition from inside their tents
  • Second Boer War was fought from 1899 to 1902 by Britain and her Empire against the Boers in South Africa 

These are the harrowing photographs of Britain’s concentrations camps during the Second Boer War show the disease-ridden tents where more than 48,000 innocent people lost their lives.

Most of the victims were women and children who were herded into the camps where disease and hunger ran rampant.

The British concentration camps took the lives of almost ten per cent of the Boer population at the time although  – unlike the Nazi camps during the Second World War – there were no executions of innocent people.

Instead, what ended up killing thousands, was malnutrition and disease. The Second Boer War was fought from 1899 to 1902 by Britain and her Empire against the Boers in South Africa.

The Boers comprised of the combined forces of the South African Republic and the Republic of the Orange Free State.

When the Boers refused to surrender to the Anglos in 1900, the British rounded-up thousands of Afrikaners (Boers) and forcibly took thousands of women and children from their farms and placed them in concentration camps.

A large group of children gathered for a Cocoa Party at the Nylstroom Camp, circa 1901. Between June 1901 and May 1902, 115,000 people were brought into the concentration camps

Native South Africans raising railway lines, singing as they lift each one. The exact date of the picture is unclear, but it is thought to have been taken around 1901. The Second Boer War (1899 – 1902) was fought by Britain and her Empire against the Boers. The Boers comprised of the combined forces of the South African Republic and the Republic of the Orange Free State

Boer men and women seated at the Nylstroom Camp for an open-air service, circa 1901. A total of 544 lives were lost at the camp.

Women and children sitting outside a grass-roofed hut at the native Klerksdorp Camp in 1901. When the Boers refused to surrender to the Anglos in 1900, the British rounded-up thousands of Afrikaners (Boers) and forcibly took thousands of women and children from their farms and placed them in concentration camps

Refugees at Merebank Station, near Durban, at around 1901. People’s entire belongings are seen piled up in bags on the side of the railway line as scores of refugees flee the war

The Barberton Camp in a picture taken in 1901. There were a total of 45 tented camps built for Boer internees and 64 camps for black Africans. Generally, they were poorly administered from the outset and thousands of people died due to the unspeakably terrible conditions

Civilians’ farms were burnt or ravaged by the British under their ‘Scorched Earth’ policy. Crops were destroyed and herds of livestock wiped out in a bid to undermine Boer survival.

Between June 1901 and May 1902, 115,000 people were brought into the concentration camps. There were a total of 45 tented camps built for Boer internees and 64 camps for black Africans.

The camps were poorly administered from the outset and thousands of people died due to the terrible conditions.

The internees received hardly any rations or medical support and were expected to grow their own crops.

The inadequate shelter, poor diet, bad hygiene and overcrowding led to malnutrition and endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery to which the children were particularly vulnerable.

A boiling water tank and oven at the Johannesburg Camp. Children watch on as four men work on the giant contraption. One man, on the left, can be seen filling what looks like a pot or a kettle with water from a tap while another man carefully places something inside the water tank using a long pole. A third man, right, is seen poking another pole into the oven. Those contained in the camps were expected to grow their own crops

A tent camp in Johannesburg in a picture taken in around 1901. Dozens of rows of tents can be seen stretching back for hundreds of yards. Common in the camps were inadequate shelter, poor diet, bad hygiene and overcrowding led to malnutrition and endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery to which the children were particularly vulnerable

Women and children pictured outside a tent in the Bloemfontein Camp in around 1901. Around 28,000 women and children and at least 20,000 black people died in the camps – the death toll represented almost 10 per cent of the Boer population

A family in the Johannesburg Camp. A turning point in the death rate in the Boers camp came about by November 1901, after Emily Hobhouse of the Fawcett Ladies Commision revealed the terrible conditions in the camps to the British public. The civil authority took over the running of the camps from Kitchener and the British command and by February 1902 the annual death-rate in the concentration camps for white inmates dropped to 6.9 percent and eventually to two percent, which was a lower rate than pertained in many British cities at the time

A refugee camp for native South Africans near Krugersdorp in a picture taken around 1901. Civilians’ farms were burnt or ravaged by the British under their ‘Scorched Earth’ policy. Crops were destroyed and herds of livestock wiped out in a bid to undermine Boer survival

Four women, wearing very basic clothing and headscarves fashioned from rags, sitting outside a grass-roofed hut at the Klerksdorp Camp

Around 28,000 women and children and at least 20,000 black people died in the camps – the death toll represented almost 10 per cent of the Boer population.

A turning point in the death rate in the Boers camp came about by November 1901, after Emily Hobhouse of the Fawcett Ladies Commision revealed the conditions in the camps to the British public.

The civil authority took over the running of the camps from Kitchener and the British command and by February 1902 the annual death-rate in the concentration camps for white inmates dropped to 6.9 percent and eventually to two percent, which was a lower rate than pertained in many British cities at the time.

Concentration Camps Reveal The Nature Of The Modern State

In the history of concentration camps, there is one thing that everyone knows: they were invented by the British. The idea of isolating unwanted population groups in purpose-built camps was implemented in South Africa in the context of the Anglo-Boer War, with horrific consequences for the Boer population. Although it would be left to the Nazis to perfect the institution, making it into one of the most recognizable in the modern world, concentration camps are the link between the Boer War and the Holocaust.

This simple narrative hides a far more complex history. Concentration camps are an institution that has changed over time, with techniques of incarceration shared and spread across the world, and of brutal ‘population management’ through terror. Above all, this is not simply a history of colonial atrocity and mad dictators; rather, it is a history that takes us to the heart of the modern state. Concentration camps reveal something about the nature of states that, in an age of heightened uncertainty and rising nationalism, should give us pause for thought.

Like most simplifications of history, the ‘Boer War to Auschwitz’ narrative is not wholly untrue. The British Army did indeed erect something called ‘concentration camps’ for Boers. But they also did so for black Africans, almost as many of whom were incarcerated as Boers and, unlike Boers, were subjected to forced labor. The camps set up by Herbert Kitchener did see massive death rates, at least at first, yet, paradoxically, improved conditions after the British proconsul Alfred Milner took over had the effect of ‘legitimising the camp idea internationally’, in the words of the historian Jonathan Hyslop.

Lizzie van Zyl, a Boer girl who starved to death in the harsh conditions of the Bloemfontein concentration camp. Photo courtesy Wikipedia

None of this was to the credit of the British. Around the same time, concentration camps or zones of ‘re-concentration’ had been set up by the Spanish in Cuba and the Americans in the Philippines. Moreover, many preceding institutions look in retrospect like proto-concentration camps: prisons, quarantined islands, slavery plantations, forced removals in colonial settings (such as Flinders Island in Australia or Shark Island in German Southwest Africa) and workhouses all show that the idea of isolating undesirable groups is ancient, and that concentration camps exist on a continuum of incarceration practices.

If the British camps – and, increasingly, those set up by the Germans in Southwest Africa in the context of the Herero and Nama Wars (1904-07) – have been remembered as so destructive, this is because of the impact of the Nazi camps. According to Hannah Arendt’s essay ‘Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps’ (1950), the Nazi extermination camps ‘must cause social scientists and historical scholars to reconsider their hitherto unquestioned fundamental preconceptions regarding the course of the world and human behaviour’. Or, as the historian Geoffrey P Megargee puts it in The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945 (2009), the Nazis’ camp system – 27 main camps and more than 1,100 satellite camps, became ‘perhaps the most pervasive collection of detention sites that any society has ever created’.

This is true, yet reading history backwards and recalling the British camps of the Boer War as precursors of the Nazi camps helps us to understand neither the British nor the Nazi camps. The former were not genocidal, and the latter became part of the genocide of the Jews only late in the war; for most of the period of the Third Reich, the camp system was separate from the ‘war against the Jews’ and the extermination camps were not part of the regular concentration camp system, as Nikolaus Wachsmann writes in KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (2015). Concentration camps are not uniform in all settings and regimes; they have multiple histories.

Rather than stressing continuity between British and Nazi or Soviet camps – as Arendt said in her essay ‘The Concentration Camps’ (1948), the former are only ‘apparent historical precedents’ – a more analytically fruitful approach is to examine the impact of the First World War. Here, for the first time in modern Europe, we see the emergence of the concept of statelessness, of superfluous people, of refugee camps, and the willingness of the state to incarcerate huge numbers of civilians considered threatening. From August 1914, France was placed by President Raymond Poincaré in a state of siege; a ‘state of exception’ that had been the norm in the colonies was now a technique of governance in Europe. In France, Belgium, Austria, Italy and Germany, the status of naturalized civilians was revoked for people of ‘enemy origin’. In an era before the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, this sudden condition of statelessness and the concomitant creation of refugee camps in Europe radicalised state behavior at a time of rising nationalism, and did more to normalize the use of concentration camps than any prior colonial precedent.

Concentration camps reveal something about the nature of states that, in an age of heightened uncertainty and rising nationalism, should give us pause for thought.

Why does this change of focus matter? The answer is not just that there is no single history of camps, no simple line of continuity from the colonial camps through the Nazis and the Soviet Gulag to the North Korean camp system. It is that concentration camps, seen as tools of population management in the era of the First World War and after, are instructive about the nature of the modern state.

Concentration camps are an interesting phenomenon in their own right, but their true relevance lies in what they tell us about our world now. If the 20th century was, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman claimed, the ‘century of camps’, this is because the world of nation states that emerged in the 20th century – and which remains with us today – is a world of fear and paranoia based on mutually exclusive notions of ethnic and national homogeneity and territorial integrity.

‘Security’ in this context breeds suspicion: of fifth columnists, racial and national pollutants and immigrants. Incarceration techniques employed in concentration camps were borrowed in a transnational framework but, more so, they were logical growths wherever the modern state emerged. They aided the state in isolating the unwanted (racial, religious, etc) and controlling the rest of the population through the implied threat of ending up in a camp for not conforming. Concentration camps, with their centralisation of terror, embody the compressed and condensed values of the state when it feels most threatened. We have not seen the last of them.

Concentration Camps: A Short History by Dan Stone is out now through Oxford University Press.Aeon counter – do not remove

The Camp

The camp

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White tents, white ant hills.
Strange, awkward stenches fills the war-torn air
Weak, but still proud, with no disinfectant
Sitting around in poverty: deprived!
Waiting for food. Waiting for water.
Humiliation. Disgrace. Filth.
Dead bodies carrying along white rows
They don’t care, they don’t think!
They can’t think. They kill.
The pain inside: it cuts deep, very deep.
No sound. No breath. No life.
No words. Only thoughts.
Blue vitriol, no food.
Children crying, children dying

Hunger screams, hunger wails
Endless waiting and timeless prayers.
Shock. Horror. Pain.
Forgotten lives.
Panic. Fright. Terror.
God! My child is dead!
Footsteps. No words.
Empty arms. Eyes watching.
Not my child!
Patience:
Another seepkissie will arrive soon
Silence…

Nikita 22/8/2013