Ohhh for the good old days when hundreds of thousands would have stood and cheered for Jameson’s raiders and the army which created the murder facilities in Dutch Africa. Actions eventually have consequences.
Oh dear.
Firstly, the Dutch Boers were hardly African natives and I assume you are aware of how the Boers treated pro-British blacks during the Boer War. No?.Read up on Magersfontein and the other torchings of black villages by the lovely Boers between 1899 and 1902.
Secondly, as I have already posted on several other threads, the British And secondly the British DID NOT ‘murder’ the 28,000 Boer men,women and children who died...(in fact there was a public outcry in Britain at the deaths..) .Incompetence and stupidity, yes. Murder,never...
As I have already explained in other threads,the Boers had no immunity to the diseases that resulted from poor British running of the camps.That is why almost all the dead were women and children and the elderly.
‘In early March 1901 Lord Kitchener decided to break the stalemate that the extremely costly war had settled into. It was costing the British taxpayer £2,5 million a month. He decided to sweep the country bare of everything that can give sustenance to the Boers i.e. cattle, sheep, horses, women and children.
This scorched earth policy led to the destruction of about 30000 Boer farmhouses and the partial and complete destruction of more than forty towns.. Thousands of women and children were removed from their homes by force.They had little or no time to remove valuables before the house was burnt down. They were then taken by oxwagon or in open cattle trucks to the nearest camp.
Conditions in the camps were less than ideal. Tents were overcrowded. Reduced-scale army rations were provided. In fact there were two scales. Meat was not included in the rations issued to women and children whose menfolk were still figthing. There were little or no vegetables, no fresh milk for the babies and children, 3/4 lb of either mealie meal, rice or potatoes, 1 lb of meat twice weekly, I oz of coffee daily, sugar 2 oz daily, and salt 0,5 oz daily (this was for adults and children who had family members on commando).
Children who were under six years of age received 0,5 lb of meal daily, 1/2 meat twice weekly, 1/4 tin of milk daily, 1 oz sugar daily and 1/2 oz of salt daily. This very poor diet led to the rapid spread of diseases such as whooping cough, measles, typhoid fever, diphtheria, diarrhoea and dysentery, especially amongst the children.
There was a chronic shortage of both medical supplies and medical staff. Eventually 26 370 women and children (81% were children) died in the concentration camps.
The visit of the British humanitarian, Miss Emily Hobhouse, a delegate of the South African Women and Children’s Distress Fund to the camps in the southern Orange Free State led to an improvement in the conditions.
On her return to Britain the story she told of the conditions under which the women and children had to live shocked everyone not committed to believe in the inevibility of the war and the harsh measures that was to end it.
Her fifteen page report to the Committee of the Distress Fund was first circulated to MP’s and published in late June. From August to December 1901 the Fawcett Commssion visited the different camps and presented their report in December confirming in all essentials the accuracy of Emily Hobhouse’s account.
They berated the camp authorities for the red tape which complicated the running of the camps, the spread of diseases that should have been foreseen, elementary rules of sanitation that had been forgotten, the vegetables that should have been provided; and the fact that medical staff should have been rushed to the scene as soon as the epidemics broke out.
Their recommendations led to improvements within the camp system. By February the annual death-rate in the camps were to drop to 6.9 percent and soon to 2 percent.’
http://www.anglo-boer.co.za/concentration.html
‘The poor diet and inadequate hygiene led to endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery. Coupled with a shortage of medical facilities, this led to large numbers of deaths — a report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 22,074 were children under 16) and 14,154 black Africans had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the camps. In all, about 25% of the Boer inmates and 12% of the black African ones died (although recent research suggests that the black African deaths were underestimated and may have actually been around 20,000).’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp
Oh, we didnt ‘invent the concentration camp’ either, as modern popular history would have you believe...
‘Contrary to what might be expected, the first recorded use of the expression “concentration camps” did not occur in either Germany or Russia. Nor, even, was the term originally English, as many also mistakenly believe. In fact, as far as it is possible to ascertain, the first person to speak of concentration camps or, more precisely, to speak of a policy of “reconcentración” - was Arsenio Martinez Campos, then the commander of the Spanish garrison in Cuba. The year was 1895, and Martinez Campos was fending off the latest in what seemed to be a never-ending series of local insurgencies. Looking for a permanent end to the Cuban independence struggle, he proposed, in a confidential letter to the Spanish government, to “reconcentrate” the civilian inhabitants of the rural districts into camps. Although he conceded that the policy might lead to “misery and famine,” it would also, he explained, deprive the insurgents of food, shelter and support, thereby bringing the war to a more rapid conclusion.
Martinez Campos didn’t manage to carry out the policy, but his successor did. Over the following two years, from 1896 to 1898, General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau forcibly removed many thousands of Cuban peasants from their homes. As predicted, “misery and famine” ensued. Theoretically, the camps were meant to consist of suitably built-dwellings, on fertile land, near sources of water. In practice, the Cuban peasants were thrown into “old shacks, abandoned houses, improvised shelters,” wherever it happened to be convenient to thrown them. Food was distributed irregularly. Typhus and dysentery spread rapidly. Young girls prostituted themselves for a bit of bread. As many as 200,000 reconcentrados may have died.
Indeed, one contemporary Cuban historian has described these first, Cuban camps as a “holocaust of gigantic proportions.” Given the connotations of the word “holocaust,” this is an inappropriate description. Nevertheless, there is a curious and rather surprising chain of connections between these first Cuban concentration camps, and the Nazi concentration camps which came into existence less than four decades later.’
http://www.anneapplebaum.com/communism/2001/10_18_nyrb_horror.html