Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges[1] or intent to file charges.[2] The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects".[3] Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement rather than confinement after having been convicted of some crime. Use of these terms is subject to debate and political sensitivities.[4] The word internment is also occasionally used to describe a neutral country's practice of detaining belligerentarmed forces and equipment on its territory during times of war, under the Hague Convention of 1907.[5]
Interned persons may be held in prisons or in facilities known as internment camps (also known as concentration camps). The term concentration camp originates from the Spanish–Cuban Ten Years' War when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in camps in order to more easily combat guerrilla forces. Over the following decades the British during the Second Boer War and the Americans during the Philippine–American War also used concentration camps.
The term "concentration camp" and "internment camp" are used to refer to a variety of systems that greatly differ in their severity, mortality rate, and architecture; their defining characteristic is that inmates are held outside the rule of law.[6]Extermination camps or death camps, whose primary purpose is killing, are also imprecisely referred to as "concentration camps".[7]
The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term concentration camp as: "A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable."[9]
Although the first example of civilian internment may date as far back as the 1830s,[10] the English term concentration camp was first used in order to refer to the reconcentration camps (Spanish:reconcentrados) which were set up by the Spanish military in Cuba during the Ten Years' War (1868–1878).[11][12] The label was applied yet again to camps set up by the United States during the Philippine–American War (1899–1902).[13] And expanded usage of the concentration camp label continued, when the British set up camps during the Second Boer War (1899–1902) in South Africa for interning Boers during the same time period.[11][14]
During the 20th century, the arbitrary internment of civilians by the state reached its most extreme forms in the SovietGulag system of concentration camps (1918–1991)[15] and the Nazi concentration camps (1933–1945). The Soviet system was the first applied by a government on its own citizens.[12] The Gulag consisted in over 30,000 camps for most of its existence (1918–1991) and detained some 18 million from 1929 until 1953,[15] which is only a third of its 73-year lifespan. The Nazi concentration camp system was extensive, with as many as 15,000 camps[16] and at least 715,000 simultaneous internees.[17] The total number of casualties in these camps is difficult to determine, but the deliberate policy of extermination through labor in many of the camps was designed to ensure that the inmates would die of starvation, untreated disease and summary executions within set periods of time.[18] Moreover, Nazi Germany established six extermination camps, specifically designed to kill millions of people, primarily by gassing.[19][20]
As a result, the term "concentration camp" is sometimes conflated with the concept of an "extermination camp" and historians debate whether the term "concentration camp" or the term "internment camp" should be used to describe other examples of civilian internment.[4]
Scholars have debated the efficacy of internment as a counterinsurgency tactic. A 2023 study found that internment during the Irish war of independence led to greater grievances among Irish rebels and led them to fight longer in the war.[28]
^Lowry, David (1976). "Human Rights Vol. 5, No. 3 "INTERNMENT: DENTENTION WITHOUT TRIAL IN NORTHERN IRELAND"". Human Rights. 5 (3). American Bar Association: ABA Publishing: 261–331. JSTOR27879033. The essence of internment lies in incarceration without charge or trial.
^Stone, Dan (2015). Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. pp. 122–123. ISBN978-0-19-879070-9. Concentration camps throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are by no means all the same, with respect either to the degree of violence that characterizes them or the extent to which their inmates are abandoned by the authorities... The crucial characteristic of a concentration camp is not whether it has barbed wire, fences, or watchtowers; it is, rather, the gathering of civilians, defined by a regime as de facto 'enemies', in order to hold them against their will without charge in a place where the rule of law has been suspended.
^James L. Dickerson (2010). Inside America's Concentration Camps: Two Centuries of Internment and Torture. Chicago Review Press. p. 29. ISBN978-1-55652-806-4.
^ abThe Columbia Encyclopedia: Concentration Camp (Sixth ed.). Columbia University Press. 2008.
^"Concentration Camp Listing". Belgium: Editions Kritak. Sourced from Van Eck, Ludo Le livre des Camps and Gilbert, Martin (1993). Atlas of the Holocaust. New York: William Morrow. ISBN0-688-12364-3.. In this online site are the names of 149 camps and 814 subcamps, organized by country.
^Evans, Richard J. (2005). The Third Reich in Power. New York: Penguin Group. ISBN978-0-14-303790-3.
Kotek, Joël (2000). Le siècle des camps (in French). Lattès. p. 805. ISBN978-2-7096-1884-7. Exhaustive history of the internment camps. Also available in German (Kotek, Joël; Rigoulot, Pierre (2001). Das Jahrhundert der Lager. Propyläen. ISBN978-3-549-07143-4.)
