By Christina Riveland

Epoch Times Staff

Mar 25, 2006

Concentration camps are nothing new. The British were the first to use the term "concentration camp" in South Africa during the Second Boer War between 1899-1902, but use of such forced resettlements to control populations goes back to early civilizations, i.e. to the Assyrians (Semitic people living in Mesopotamia between 1170 B.C.-612 B.C.).

Explicit records of groups of civilians being concentrated into large prison camps date from a more recent era. The British, after the fighting in the Boer War, then used such camps to confine and control large numbers of civilians in a concentrated area. Tens of thousands of survivors of the second Boer War died as a result of diseases caused by overcrowding, poor sanitation and inadequate diets. It was then the term "concentration camp" was coined, to signify the "concentration" of a large number of individuals in one place. The term applied equally to camps the Spanish had established in Cuba in 1895 to curb anti-insurgency campaigns. None of these were extermination camps. At the end of World War II, the British constructed camps in Cyprus to prevent Jewish emigration into Palestine. Over time these camps held 50,000 people, including 30,000 Holocaust survivors. 11,000 of them were not released until 1949.

In the summer of 1838, U.S. President van Buren ordered the army to commence a large-scale confinement of all Cherokee Nation members. What happened in these camps is forever a blemish on the American human rights record. During the Philippine-American War of 1901, General J. Franklin Bell initiated a concentration camp policy in Batangas; and between 1935 and 1937, the U.S. National Park Service forcibly relocated 437 families from the area now known as Shenandoah National Park into resettlements and then burned or moved their homesteads. The latest U.S. facility under scrutiny is the Guantanamo Camp, but Amnesty International does not call this facility a concentration camp.

The image most people hold when they hear the term "concentration camp" is that of the Nazi extermination camps and of Stalin's gulags. More living evidence exists about the Nazi camps than of Stalin's camps. Some of this evidence was told to me during dialogue with Holocaust survivors and by Holocaust victims prior to their incarceration, telling of horrid medical experiments performed without anesthesia, of the starvation, diseases and despair. Conscientious people are working diligently to prevent such tragedy from ever happening again.

But it is happening again, right now, to thousands in China, at many locations, and particularly at a place called the Sujiatan Concentration Camp in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, north of the Bohai Sea. The entire facility is constructed under ground, along the models of defense facilities during war time. Concentration camps have always been places that robbed people of their autonomy. Inmates in these camps are considered free or cheap labor. Chinese internment camps, detention centers, prisons and forced labor facilities exploit the populations in these camps, often working them to the point of exhaustion while at the same time indoctrinating them with warped propaganda. Those who survive and are eventually released are physically worn out and frequently mentally ill. The ones who previously had violent tendencies experience greater anger management difficulties than before.

All this is bad enough and does not contribute to a mentally well-functioning population. What is happening at the Sujiatan camp, though, is most abominable. Of the 6,000 people estimated to be incarcerated there, many are innocent citizens who merely try to live their lives according to their belief system. The huge numbers of innocent people who are held there are incarcerated merely because the Communist regime considers them a political threat. Their numbers are staggering. The Communist regime desperately needs money! Their internationally touted prosperity is sheer window dressing.

The Communist system is bankrupt. Any Communist Party member hanging around the fringes seeks to line his/her own pockets as quickly as possible, to get on the "gravy train" before the system sees its demise. The methods these morally bankrupt people use at the Sujiatan camp are demonic: they first denounce and then incarcerate innocent citizens for the sole purpose of harvesting and selling their organs, a highly profitable "business!" These pitiable victims are never told when their execution time is set - when organs are about to be harvested depends on the demand from patients who need them and the doctors who conspire with the camp to perform surgery. Everyone profits - the camp, the guards, the doctors and the hospitals performing the transplant surgeries. After the organs have been removed, the incisions are hastily closed and the body is sent to the on-site crematorium for immediate disposal. Oftentimes family members are not told at all or told much later what happened to their loved ones. An infrastructure to counsel these bereaved families and help them make sense of these senseless acts is not in place, nor will they receive any kind of compensation for their loss.

I must wonder if any of these individuals involved in this human tragedy still dare call themselves part of the human family, or if they can still look themselves in the mirror and not recoil from the horror that stares back at them.

Over the course of the 20th century it became more common for ruling officials to arbitrarily intern civilian populations for various reasons.

Sometimes "concentration camp" and "extermination camp" are used synonymously, but a concentration camp by definition is not a death camp.

The Sujiatun camp might be the exception. That is why immediate intervention for the sake of the potential victims is so crucial!

Camps have existed and some are still in use in the following nations and their peoples: Argentina, Austria/Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United Kingdom, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, PRC, Poland, Russia and the Soviet Union, Serbia, Slovakia, the Netherlands, North Korea, and the USA.

Of all the nations where we know camps have existed, none have a human rights record as abominable as the Chinese Sujiatun camp. Let us do what we can to close this camp now!

Posting date: 3/28/2006
Original article date: 3/28/2006
Category: News & Media Reports

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