Adolf Hitler made locking people away in camps a defining feature of his campaign to rid Germany of Jews.
Generations of Jewish people suffered dastardly torture which turned them into outcasts in their own country. Millions were eventually murdered. Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies established more than 44000 camps and incarceration sites, including ghettos.
During 1992, Bosnian and Serb forces set up the Omarska Camp as a lockdown camp in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina for more than 6000 Bosnian and Croat men and women during the Prijedor massacre of 700 people. There were three other such camps. In the US, President Donald Trump relentlessly locks up migrant people in cages and camps to “make America great again”.
During the Anglo-Boer War, the British locked up their enemies in inhumane camps, the pain of which still lives within the country’s national narrative.
From June 1901 to May 1902, more than 115000 people were brought into these camps. About 45 tented locked-down camps were built for Boer internees and 64 camps for black Africans. It is a historical fact that the camps were poorly administered from the outset and thousands of people died due to terrible, inhumane conditions.
Mass internal displacements of people into camps is not endorsed as an acceptable practice by the UN and other global human rights bodies. Locked-down camps are always the result of a violation of peace, mass regional or national trauma or war.
The one universal outcome of a locked-away camp is that it increases one’s sense of isolation and alienation from the community - and says “you are not one of us”.
It also destroys and diminishes one’s own sense of value and heightens the sense of mental and physical subjugation. In extreme cases, it creates the notion of torture as a part of regular life.
This begs the question as to why municipalities are locking homeless people away into camps during the national crisis?
Although these camps are not in any way the horror death camps of the past, this Trumpian practice of locking people away in dystopian camps goes against everything our democracy stands for.
It goes against everything we believe about how people should be treated by a democratic and stable government, especially black, marginalised people, who have suffered historical injustices and marginalisation, and who constitute the majority of the homeless cohort.
It is disturbing to see what we will mentally accept as good for our fellow South Africans, while we will condemn it everywhere else.
The fact is that vulnerable people are always at the mercy of coercion, being forced to accept conditions they might not agree with.
In addition, coercion is often accompanied by what we call “opportunity deception”, the act where one is offered a tantalising opportunity by those who hold power, often of a better life, only to find it is not the case.
In a 2002 paper, “Who gets to choose? Coercion, Consent and the UN Trafficking Protocol”, by Jo Doezema, from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Brighton, she outlines how global human traffickers use these two forces of coercion and deception to convince poor, at-risk people to give up their agency to become the property of others. There are striking similarities as to how homeless people are coerced and deceived by promises of a better life “somewhere else”.
But here is my deeper concern: why are religious organisations and citizen groups only waking up now to the plight of homeless people?
Every church, synagogue and mosque should have opened its doors to homeless people decades ago. We would not be sitting with this crisis we have today.
It would be fair to say: if you don’t have homeless people as part of your religious community, then what worth is your religion?
* Lorenzo A Davids is chief executive of the Community Chest.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Argus