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by andrew1
5932 days ago
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It sounds like you know a lot more about the Boer concentration camps than I do, maybe you can clear something up for me. From a quick perusal of Wikipedia it seems as if the concentration camps in the Boer war were intended to be more like prisons, i.e. restricting the movements of those persons held there. Due to incompetence, negligence, lack of facilities/medicine a large proportion of the inmates died. I would not wish to lessen this tragedy, but it does sound like a different situation to what we understand a concentration camp to be in common parlance, i.e. a camp set up with the intention of working to death/explicitly killing those sent there. I think there is a distinction between those two types of camps, and while both are highly unpleasant I don't think they're actually the same thing. |
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Sounds like what the Germans would say today if Hitler had won the war and founded a strong and dominant Germany? yeah there were mistakes but they weren't intentional. Sure.
The point is that an argument could be (and was) made that such starvation and ill treatment was intentional, as a method of forcing the Boer commandos to surrender. The British were essentially stalemated and could see no way of ending the war. By the accepted norms of war of the time, starving non combatants to death was a crime. But the British won and were a World Power (much as the USA is today), so no one convened the equivalent of Nuremberg. If the Boers had won, (unlikely, but just as a thought experiment) you bet your ass some Britsh politician would have been "criminals".
Let us read Wikipedia though.
"Hobhouse published a report in June 1901 which contradicted Brodrick's claim, and Lloyd George then openly accused the government of "a policy of extermination" directed against the Boer population.
In June 1901, Liberal opposition party leader Campbell-Bannerman took up the assault and answered the rhetorical "When is a war not a war?" with "When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa," referring to those same camps and the policies that created them."
All that said, do read up on the Khaki Elections and the Boer War. Don't just read Wikipedia. Read your history in some depth and then talk.
" i.e. a camp set up with the intention of working to death/explicitly killing those sent there."
This is exactly what some people, especially the Boers and their allies the Germans thought the British were doing (see above). The British Leader of the Opposition even claimed as much!
Political maneovres aside, What matters is that people died in the tens of thousands. ( A report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 24,074 [50% of the Boer child population] were children under 16) had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about one in four (25%) of the Boer inmates, mostly children, died.
It is thought that about 12% of black African inmates died (about 14,154) but the precise number of deaths of black Africans in concentration camps is unknown as little attempt was made to keep any records of the 107,000 black Africans who were interned. It is, however, worth noting that Emily Hobhouse and the Fawcett Commission only ever concerned themselves with the camps that held white Boer refugees. No one paid much attention to what was going on in the camps that held native refugees". - Wikipedia)
Is it a lesser number than Jews in the Holocaust? Sure. Was starving non combatants to death (and denying that such things were happening) a "war crime"? You tell me. Victors are never war criminals are they?