- Wide Angle: From the sea to the Libyan war: the double hell of migrants
- Turkey: Syrian refugees from Istanbul, Turkish heads of the economic crisis
- United States: The drama of migrant children in the United States: "They live overcrowded, like in a prison"
They flee from war or misery. They cross rivers, seas and jungles with their children hand in hand and their past packed behind their backs, believing they will find something similar to the future. However, death often awaits them. Those who survive should avoid border agents so as not to end up locked in centers that, if not prisons, resemble them very much . No right to call a lawyer. Overcrowded, without receiving medical attention. Treated as criminals without having committed any crime.
"Refugee camps built to accommodate mass immigration have become hybrid camps midway between refugee camps and concentration camps. Where there are camps to isolate refugees and relegate them to dangerous and inhospitable territories, these spaces serve as de facto as detention areas (....) and begin to adopt the characteristics of the concentration camps, "writes the American journalist Andrea Pitzer in her book A Long Night , the result of an investigation of more than 10 years in which a review of the history of concentration camps highlighting the similarities that exist between the Nazi death camps and the institutions where migrant groups are held.
Last month, Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited migrant detention centers on the southern border between the United States and Mexico and said they were like "concentration camps." Is there a shared philosophy between these two detention centers? It is clear that the former do not aim at the extermination of prisoners but "there is an idea that is to classify people, give them a number, consider them a mass because they are suspected of being criminals. It is something that comes from the rules colonial and that is standardized in the twentieth century with totalitarianisms, "confirms Gutmaro Gómez Bravo, Doctor of History from the Complutense University of Madrid, expert in political violence and social control.
The Cuban origin of the concentration camps
Although there is a tendency to think that it is in Nazi Germany where concentration camps arise, Pitzer goes back more than a century to the so-called reconcentration , a policy implemented by Spanish generals in Cuba in the 19th century to curb independence . It consisted of enclosing civilians in military-controlled lands, surrounded by barbed wires. The United States used them later in the war with the Philippines. The decades pass and the technique is improving.
The author travels to the different scenarios of horror. Shark Island, the Island of Death, in present-day Namibia, at the beginning of the 20th century. Soviet gulags. Dachau Auschwitz The National Stadium in Santiago de Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship. The Salt Pit, the CIA interrogation center in Afghanistan. Christmas, Manus and Nauru, the remote islands of the Pacific where Australia holds asylum seekers in centers where complaints are accumulated: abuse, suicide, torture.
" Things can be concentration camps without needing to be Auschwitz, " he explained in a recent article published by Esquire Waitman Wade Beorn, an American historian who is an expert on the Holocaust. Last month, a report by the US Department of Homeland Security revealed the conditions of migrant centers on the border. Men shaking bars showing notes that prayed: Help, get us out of here. Mothers separated from their children. Poorly fed children who cannot wash themselves. Adults forced to stand by overcrowding in cells. Prolonged detention much longer than the law.
The classification and punishment
The fact of enclosing people who have not committed a crime is " something completely contrary to the presumption of innocence and the most basic rights. At the level of the philosophy behind the death camps it has many parallels. Regarding classification and idea of punishment, there are parallels, "explains Gomez Bravo.
Complaints about the abuses suffered by migrants are growing, in the same way that the number of displaced people worldwide also increases. Last June, this figure reached a world record of almost 71 million people fleeing wars, persecutions or conflicts. It is almost the same population of Turkey.
"Nobody wonders what is next. Those people have not committed any crime, we must continue to remember it," laments Paloma Favieres, director of Policies and Campaigns of the Spanish Commission for Refugee Assistance (CEAR), which points, in the case national, to the constant denunciations of NGOs and activists about the conditions in which they are held - usual euphemism to refer to detention - foreigners in the CIE of Aluche. Lack of medical attention. Tortures Vexatious deals. Aggressions that often occur in areas where there are no cameras that can register them, as reported by the NGO Karibu, and that, in general, are answered with indifference and silence by the whole political class.
"You cannot allow people in a CIE to die in a rule of law," continues Favieres, who denounces that the response to an administrative infraction - the irregular stay - "cannot lead to deprivation of liberty, the legal good plus important that a person has. "
The foreigner is the enemy
The rhetoric that justifies the massive detention of foreigners is that of the invasion. "Violators", "criminals", "drug traffickers who come to invade us". In all these ways the president of the United States, Donald Trump, has referred to immigrants. They are dehumanized to deprive them of rights. They are labeled "monsters" or "insects" to justify - in addition to the construction of the Wall with Mexico - violence against them.
In the last year, the Venezuelan exodus has triggered xenophobia in Brazil, Peru or Ecuador. In Germany, the extreme right grows in the heat of the discourse of hatred of the immigrant, the almost one million refugees that the country has received since 2015. A month ago, a bombing of a migrant detention center in Libya left fifty dead . The UN has denounced that centers violate all international norms on Human Rights. On the Greek islands about 12,000 people are trapped in overflowing camps. In Vathy (Samos), thousands of families live under plastic tarps surrounded by garbage. In the field of Moria in Lesbos, with a capacity for 3,000 people, (over) they live almost triple in such terrible conditions, unable to sleep well or maintain minimum personal hygiene, which Doctors Without Borders has warned of the "overwhelming" number of people With suicidal thoughts.
"One of the ideas of the pre-war speeches is that the foreigner brought diseases, epidemics. It is no longer the case but the idea of associating the foreigner with the disease, with the dirt, with everything bad, is still there, " Gómez Bravo explains.
At the same time, very gradually, since the migration crisis peaked in 2015, the way in which the political class and the media have referred to this problem has changed. For a long time, they were refugees. They escaped political persecution, war or hunger. Now they are called migrants, a concept so broad that it includes anyone who moves from the country.
Articles 13, 14 and 15 of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War regulate the rights of detainees in these circumstances, which must, in any case, be "humanely treated" and "protected against any act of violence or intimidation." In addition, they have the right "to respect for their person and their honor" and their maintenance and medical assistance must be taken care of. Reality shows that migrants in detention centers are treated worse than prisoners of war.
"Whenever international standards on the treatment of prisoners are not met there is a suspicion that their rights are not being respected. There must be a few square meters per person, a guaranteed communication, minimum habitability conditions, all that is regulated and it should be respected, "recalls Gomez Bravo, before pointing out that the debate that should be opened is about whether or not to detain immigrants solves the migratory movements that, as History shows, are unstoppable.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more- U.S
- Germany
- Mexico
- Un
- Peru
- Afghanistan
- Australia
- Brazil
- Ecuador
- Libya
- Refugees
Migration crisis Donald Trump's legal wall collapses Mexico
Macroeconomics The IMF cuts global growth due to the US-China trade war and Brexit
Economy Mark Carney, favorite to succeed Lagarde