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The
laws governing warfare and conflict make no reference to concentration
camps. But for more than a century, concentration camps have been
a venue for wholesale war crimes and the symbol of the worst abuses
against civilians in wartime.
It was a Spanish general, Valeriano Weyler, who established the
first reconcentrados or “concentration centers”
in Cuba in his drive to suppress the 1895 rebellion. Britain introduced
concentration camps on a massive scale during the Boer War from
1899 to 1902. To deny the Boer guerrillas food and intelligence,
Gen. Lord Kitchener ordered the British Army to sweep the Transvaal
and Orange River territories of South Africa “clean.”
Civilians—women, children, the elderly, and some men of fighting
age—were herded from their homes and concentrated in camps
along railway lines, with a view to their eventual removal from
the territory. The Boers, to whom these camps became a symbol of
genocide, called them laagers.
The Nazis developed a vast network of Konzentrationslager,
using them at first to hold political prisoners, later slave labor,
and finally to annihilate European Jewry and to kill large numbers
of Poles, Russians, and Gypsies. Of the nearly 6 million Jews killed
under Hitler’s “Final Solution,” 2 million died in
Auschwitz, the main extermination center.
No one in the post–World War II generation could have anticipated
the reappearance of such camps in Europe. On that August 1992 day
when my colleagues and I from the British television network ITN
alighted from our vans, it was hard to gauge who was more amazed
to see whom. Before us, there was a landscape of human misery that
seemed to recall another time: men, some of them skeletal, lined
up behind a barbed wire fence, with lantern jaws and xylophone ribcages
visible beneath their putrefied skin. They, in turn, saw a camera
crew and a clutch of reporters advancing across the withered summer
grass.
This was Logor Trnopolje, a teeming mass of wretched humanity—scared,
sunburned, and driven out of house and home. Among them was the
figure of Fikret Alic, whose emaciated torso behind sharp knots
of wire would become the enduring symbol of Bosnia’s war, of
its cruelty and its echo of the worst calamities of our century.
Alic had come from yet another camp, Kereterm, where he had broken
down in tears, having been ordered to help clear up some 150 corpses,
the result of the previous night’s massacre.
I ventured into Trnopolje, past families crammed against one another
on the floor of what had been a school, past stinking holes dug
into the ground for what were intended to be cesspits. “I can’t
tell you everything that goes on,” said one young inmate, Ibrahim
Demirovic, “but they do whatever they want.” A gracious
doctor, Idriz, had been put in charge of a “medical center”
where he gave us an undeveloped film—it showed his patients,
beaten literally black and blue.
The day after the discovery of Trnopolje and Omarska, I shied from
calling them concentration camps because of the inevitable association
with the bestial policies of the Third Reich. I reasoned that we
must take extreme care in relating genocides of our lifetime and
the Holocaust, which was singular and inimitable. While thousands
were purposefully killed in the gulag of Serbian camps, did that
equate with the Nazis’ industrial mass murder of Jews and others?
On reflection, concentration camp is exactly the right term for
what we uncovered that day. For here civilian populations were literally
concentrated —frog-marched in columns or bused to locations
for illegal purposes of maltreatment, torture, abuse, killing, and,
crucially, enforced transfer, or ethnic
cleansing. Indeed, The UN’s independent Commission of Experts
determined after a year long study that Trnopolje was a concentration
camp, and Omarska and Keraterm “de facto death camps.”
In general, the laws which would apply to concentration camps address
the topic piecemeal, and the principal element is unlawful
confinement, a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Confinement of civilians is not necessarily unlawful. “Foreign”
civilians who pose a threat to a party to a conflict may be put
in “places of internment” or given an “assigned residence.”
However, the threat they pose must be genuine, evidenced by some
clear action, not merely by their nationality. It is also lawful
to remove civilians for their own security in an emergency, such
as an impending battle, and set up temporary shelters for them.
Even so, they must be returned home as soon as it is safe to do
so and be well cared for in the meantime. Also, some civilians may
be held or imprisoned as suspects or criminals, so long as they
are given due process. In an internal
conflict, noncombatants may be interned but are entitled to humane
treatment and the judicial protections guaranteed by a regularly
constituted court. None of these safeguards exist in concentration
camps. Confinement under such conditions is thus unlawful. The arbitrary
imprisonment of large numbers of civilians during conflicts—internal
or international—can be a crime against humanity.
The themes of the “concentration” and “clearance”
of civilians came to dominate the last phase of the Boer War, just
as they dominated the entire Bosnian War, most notably in its early
stages. As we know, the removal of Muslims and Croats from Serbian
terrain was not a by-product of a war between armies, it was the
raw material, the declared aim, of the Serbs.
The Boer War concentration camps aroused outrage and fury back in
Britain, led by temperance crusader Emily Hobhouse. She described
“deportations… a burned-out population brought in by hundreds
of convoys… semi-starvation in the camps… fever-stricken
children lying on the bare earth… appalling mortality.”
The camps provoked Lloyd George to thunder, “When is a war
not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism.”
Even the all-woman Fawcett Committee, which supported the British
war but made intrepid inspections of the concentration camps, was
struck by the conditions at Mafeking, where women were washing clothes
in water fouled by excreta, or at Brandfort, where an epidemic killed
337 people in three weeks. These places were by no means Auschwitz
or Belsen, but they were concentration camps.
The term concentration camp implies not so much a prison or assigned
residence for POWs or even civilians, but a role in an overall process
of “clearance.” The fact that the Serbs sought to defend
Trnopolje by describing it as a “transit camp” confirms
the point: there is an entwinement between concentration camps and
the forced movement or clearance of population.
In their description of Trnopolje in the trial verdict against Dusko
Tadic, judges in The Hague noted that “there was no regular
regime of interrogations or beating, as in other camps, but beatings
and killings did occur.” They referred to testimony about “dead
people wrapped in paper and wired together, their tongues pulled
out… and the slaughtered bodies of young girls and old men.”
The judges acknowledged that some inmates were allowed to forage
for food in the village beyond the camp. But this “in effect
amounted to imprisonment,” since many were killed during these
excursions, and survivors feared repeating them.
Moreover, “because this camp housed the largest number of women
and girls, there were more rapes at this camp than any other. Girls
between the ages of 16 and 19 were at the greatest risk… the
youngest girl being 12 years of age.” One girl serially raped
by seven Serbian soldiers suffered “terrible pains… and
hemorrhaging.”
But what hallmarked Trnopolje was the fact that the camp was, as
the judges said, “the culmination of the campaign of ethnic
cleansing, since those Muslims and Croats who were not killed at
the Omarska and Kereterm camps were, from Trnopolje, deported.”
This is one of the defining essences of concentration camps—that
the detaining power wishes to be rid of their inmates, either by
killing them, or else by enforced transit elsewhere.
In the case of Trnopolje, these transits—the concentration
camp’s purpose—were utterly terrifying. I went on one
of them, in this instance of Muslims from the town of Sanski Most.
Because they were internal
displacements, from Serb-controlled northern Bosnia into government-held
regions, they attracted little attention aside from the news media.
A year later, in September 1993, I found myself uncovering another
concentration camp: Dretelj. This time the inmates were Muslims,
their guards Bosnian-Croat. Most of the prisoners were locked away
in the dank darkness of two underground hangars, dug into facing
hillsides. The metal doors had been slid open for our visit, but
many men preferred to stay inside, staring as though blind into
the ether. “We’re not really allowed out,” said one.
These men had been locked in here for up to seventy-two hours at
a time, without food or water, drinking their own urine to survive.
They all remembered the night in July 1993 when the Croat guards
got drunk and began firing through the doors—between ten and
twelve men died that night; the back wall of the hangar was pockmarked
with bullets.
The plan was simple; the Bosnian Croat authorities explained them
to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) at a
meeting in the coastal resort of Makarska during the week before
our discovery of the camp. The proposal was to ship fifty thousand
Muslim men to a transit camp at nearby Ljubuski, and thence to third
countries. The Croatian Foreign Minister Mate Granic said his country
would do all it could to help. Would the UNHCR? The aid workers
were flabbergasted, caught in a heinous dilemma: to cooperate with
the aim of Dretelij and three other concentration camps, or else
to leave the men festering in conditions which had been hidden from
the International Committee of the Red Cross for two months.
Any such fulfillment of the concentrations camps’ goal is illegal
deportation anyway. But in addition
to its laws on confinement, the Geneva Convention of 1949 does regulate
the transfer of internees—to take the Serbs’ and Croats’
own sanitized description of their concentration camps. This shall,
says Article 127, “always be effected humanely,” and as
a general rule by rail or other means of transport. “If, as
an exceptional measure, such removals have to be effected on foot,
they may not take place unless the internees are in a fit state
of health.”
The convention continues: “When making decisions regarding
the transfer of internees, the detaining power shall take their
interests into account, and in particular shall not do anything
to increase the difficulties of repatriating them or returning them
to their own homes.” At the time of writing, that provision,
with regard to those “concentrated” at Trnopolje and Dretelj,
remains infamously and horribly unfulfilled.
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