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R
ecent years have witnessed a noticeable
growth in the use of camps of all sorts across
the world. There are refugee camps in the
Democratic Republic of Congo and in
nations bordering Syria; in the UK there are
Immigration Removal Centres in places such
as Harmondsworth. At the other end of the
scale, there is a large camp system in North
Korea about which we know very little.
There has also been much recent concern that
so-called ‘re-education camps’ in China
holding people of the Uighur ethnic group
are being used to separate families. Following a fact-finding mission to Myanmar,
international human rights lawyer Chris Sidoti has said that Rohingya Muslims are
being held in concentration camps.
The camp phenomenon is increasing, but what specifically denotes a concentra-
tion camp? These are places of horror and dehumanisation, sites where civilians are
extracted from ‘normal’ society and held against their will. Most important, they
are installations where the rule of law has been abandoned – where the inmates
have no means of contesting their incarceration.
Despite this increasing prevalence of camps around the world, the revelations this
summer about the conditions of migrants detained on the border between Mex-
ico and the US state of Texas have sparked particular condemnation. An internal
US watchdog report published in July, on facilities in the Rio Grande area, Texas,
highlighted “dangerous overcrowding”, with photographs showing 71 men in a cell
designed for 41 women. Pennsylvania Representative Madeleine Dean tweeted that
conditions were “far worse than we ever could have imagined ”.
As well as the specific conditions in these US-Mexico border
facilities, their very existence has sparked debate. A volatile
political issue intensified when US representative and Democratic
politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to them as
“concentration camps”. “The US is running concentration camps
on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are,” she
said in an Instagram Live video. “I want to talk to the people that
are concerned enough with humanity to say that... ‘never again’
means something.” She went on to write: “This administration
has established concentration camps on the southern border of
the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalised
with dehumanising conditions and dying. This is not hyperbole.
It is the conclusion of expert analysis.” She cited the work of
Andrea Pitzer, author of the 2017 book One Long Night: A Global
Protests in Turkey against ‘re-education
camps’ in China, which reports claim are
used to separate Uighur families
