Internments: CPT and other camps

Foreword

This issue of Conflitti globali is introduced by a map – the one produced by the research collective Migreurop – which effectively suggests the idea of the European Union as a big cage: almost two hundreds facilities dedicated to internment, control, and identification of migrants and displaced people. The visual effect of the map is therefore of a «chicken pox», whose spots are mainly concentrated within the current EU border, extending nonetheless their propagation to the EU candidates countries or to particular «mandatory» states – Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia –, as well as to countries with which Europe keeps uncertain and ambivalent relations, like Putin’s Russia or Gheddafi’s Libya. Moreover, the map irresistibly calls to mind the dislocation of legions and fortresses at the time when the Roman empire, though still formally unified, began to disgragate. As at that time, the imperial limes consisted of small fortresses and towers, and, above all, of small-size allied kingdoms which effectively worked as buffer-zones between the Roman territory and the external world, so nowadays the real European limes passes through the camps the EU member states are creating within their own territory or outsourcing/subcontracting to neighbour external countries. It is not by chance that Poland - apparently forgetting its own tragic past - appears to be filled up with internment facilities, and that Warsaw is nowadays hosting the Frontex, the EU special bureau for border control.

The typology of camps is definitively various: from the facilities built up nearby police offices, harbour docks or airports (as in the U.K. and in other northern European countries), to the permanent internment centres, to the enclosed dumps particularly diffused within the poorer countries of the former soviet block, with arguably inhumane yet totally unknown life conditions. Yet, there is another aspect that the map cannot consider: it is the continuity between the European camp network and the global system of internment. Regardless of different, discrete, penal systems, the world as a whole appears to be full of extra-juridical detention and reclusion sites. If we only consider the situation beyond the European south-eastern border – that is, beyond the detention centres for migrants the Turkish Government has built up in order to quickly answer to EU pressures –, we find Iraq in its permanent war situation, with Abu Ghraib and several other unknown or less known top-security, extraterritorial prisons. And if we proceed south, we run into the Palestinian territories that, after the construction of the wall which is enclosing the Cis-Jordanian and because of the relentless realisation of check-points and blockades by the Israeli Government, could be considered as a huge internment camp for an entire population. But what do we know about Afghanistan? Or Colombia? Not to say of the whole central-American region, used by US Government as a filter in order to control migrants coming from the whole southern continent? And what about the sub-Saharan Africa? Or Thailand, whose Government has realised a system of control based upon detention centres and military control in order to counter the movement of people living in the border area between Myanmar and Laos? And what about China, or Tibet? The list of borders areas infested by camps and internment facilities should probably be much longer. On a similar background, a place like Guantanamo’s Camp Delta seems to be the extreme instance of a diversified, yet pervasive and above all structured and «coherent» system.

Actually, the control of migrants’ movement is only the most evident and immediate, yet partial, dimension of the global resort to camps, as «empty spaces» which are removed from any judicial and juridical control - even where nominally exists. As testified by the landfall, on the Italian coasts, of migrants and asylum seekers coming from Kurdistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine, Sri-Lanka, Nigeria, and so on, the internment system is one of the key factors of a complex global war machine: it is the essential cardan-joint which transforms displaced people into a potential exploited and exploitable labour force. While transforming people in flight from war and starvation into clandestine and illegal presences, the control and internment system realises two goals with a single tool: it abolishes or radically reduces the asylum «problem» and let («illegal») migrants, once they are periodically released by camps, to swell the ranks of the black labour market. This is particularly true in the Italian case, where the migrant labour force suffers from a systematic, radical lack of rights. Being deprived of recognition and excluded from citizenship standards, migrants are thus potentially subject to the most extreme abuses. In the last year, for instance, several clues suggest that a certain number of Polish «illegal» workers literally disappeared in the countryside of Puglia, without provoking any emotion or alarm in the so-called «civil society», but just a shy judicial investigation. Migrants’ lives do not matter: they are simple figures and factors which can fuel the machine of the material production or satisfy the relentless need of an enemy which western democracies seem to need to support their more and more restricted consensual basis. In both cases, the global system of internment watches over such a double function.

Besides, crucial is also the externalisation and outsourcing of the internment camps: in return for some millions of Euros as well as for an uncertain international legitimisation, Morocco and Libya have built their own detention and identification camps. Nowadays, even Senegal detains its own clandestine migrants, while, in the offshore of the Moroccan and Mauritanian coasts, different European military navies cooperate in order to «protect» the Canarias islands from «African landings». The main effect is that a further element of uncertainty, and therefore of a potential genocide, has to be added to the several others which are devastating Africa. It was precisely in order to avoid internment in Moroccan or Libyan camps that eighty Senegalese citizens have renounced to reach Europe by land, embarking to Canary islands towed by a merchant ship, on the Christmas day of 2005. Arguably sighted by a navy ship, the smugglers cut the towline and fled away. Six months later, the boat was discovered on a Barbados beach, two thousands miles away from Senegal, with only eleven mummified corpses and the documents of the others on board.

Only the hypocrisy characterising any European debate on migrations and migration policies avoids to call with its proper name this fact, as well as the several shipwrecks in the Sicily Canal or in front of Gibraltar and of the Canarias islands: a massacre, a slaughter. These wrecks may happen on the open sea as well as in open land. As a matter of fact, similarly mummified and dehydrated by the sun, there are the thousands of corpses the Migra discovers every year in the Arizona desert. And while the immediate reason of these deaths has to be found in the barbed wire and the wall surrounding the US-Mexican border, as well as the military navies monitoring the European coasts, yet they are all symptoms of a broader global system of internment, whose main device is precisely the camp, the dumping ground where to detain a disposable humanity.

This issue of the journal intends to explore the political sense of the European map mentioned above, starting by a number of questions: is it possible to ascribe current camps, in all their possible phenomenologies (for migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, internally or externally displaced persons), to a more general «form»? Can we catch the specific violence proper to a camp in the way it informs and deforms language? Is it possible, besides, to discover a matrix of current internment system in the sequence of events happened in 1938 in France, when internment camps emerged, as Hannah Arendt suggests, as the only possible territory for people who do not belong anywhere? And, over and above possible genealogies, can we read in the extreme instance of the prolonged detention for «enemy combatants» (like Camp Delta in the Guantanamo base) a kind of internment which invests a person for what he/she could potentially commit in the future rather than what he/she is supposed to have done in the past?

While the first section of the issue generally investigates the possible meaning of the «camp form», the second one directly describes a certain number of internment situations: from the «enclosed» Palestine, where for the first time the «camp form» seems to assume a state form, to the strategies of confinement of migrants, beduins and refugees in the adjacent Ghor Valley; from the particular «laboratory» of deportations and interments which is emerging between the island of Lampedusa and Libya, to the emergency reconstruction process characterising the post-tsunami Sri Lanka, and the specific forms of domestic reclusion suffered by migrant care-givers. Beside these situations, where camps emerge as dispositifs producing new forms of sovereignty and radical status differences, the analysis takes into account the specific forms of resistance, opposition and flight investing any kind of camps, from the Italian CPT to the Australian detention centres. And it also tries to give a visual account of the sequence of walls, fences and enclosures which are following and re-drawing present time borders. In the middle of the two sections, as an interlude, we publish an excerpt of Viktor Klemperer diaries, the questioning gaze of a survived in the Germany of 1945, and few verses of an American «minor» poet, Randall Jarrel, who casts a moonlight shadow on everyday life at wartime.

Contents

Internamenti

La forma campo –Federico Rahola

Europa, 1938 –Gérard Noiriel

Il linguaggio nei campi –Luca Guzzetti

Modello Guantanamo –Jess Whyte

Balcan cities –Kyong Park

spettri

Giugno 1945. I diari dell’amarezza –Viktor Klemperer

Cinque poesie di guerra –Randall Jarrell

materiali

Fortezze –fotografie di Bruna Orlandi

La guerra ai pirati del XXI secolo –Roberto Ciccarelli

Gli anni di Oslo e la Palestina reclusa –Marco Allegra

Rifugiati, migranti e nomadi –Mauro Van Aken

Contro i confini –Angela Mitropoulos, Brett Neilson

Tra Lampedusa e la Libia –Rutvica Andrijasevic

Ricostruzioni di emergenza –Camillo Boano

Interni domestici –Francesca Scrinzi

Percorsi di liberazione –Emilio Quadrelli

Abstracts

The «camp form». A genealogy of present-time detention and transit spaces

by Federico Rahola

The displaced people of present time are governmentally classified through a series of partages, definitions and categories (temporary refugees, internally displaced persons, asylum seekers, forced or economic migrants), which reify the lack of belonging characterizing their status and subsume it under the common specter of a camp. While suggesting to refer to the different manifestations camps assume in present time as to a broader and dialectical «form», the article stresses the way human displacement is produced as a political surplus (thus economically exploitable) insofar as internment camps are not only the sole actual territories «available» to displaced people, but also what defines their lives as potentially «internable» and deportable. As devices that directly introduce a radical political difference (expressed in terms of the possibility to be administratively interned and deported) even within a politically homogeneous territory, rather than a simple exclusion, camps produce a differential composition within the very notion of citizenship, materially realizing a kind of apartheid regime. Outlining a genealogy of this particular dispositif - from the colonial order to the global present - the article stresses the original link between internment camps and a general state of war (rather than a specific state of exception, which always alludes to a unique and static notion of sovereignty), thus suggesting the «international», or eventually the global, as the specific «space of the outside» (opposed as such to the any internal, national order) the «camp form» belongs to.

Critiquing the Violence of Guantanamo. Against the Monopolisation of the Future

by Jess Whyte

The article seeks to understand the conception of history and of the future that is adequate to Guantanamo Bay as an interrogation camp. It will argue that the detention of so-called enemy combatants represents an individualization of the doctrine of preemption, which asserts that threats must be neutralized before they are allowed to emerge. Preemption, it will argue, occurs not at the level of actions but at the level of intent. Preemption is necessary, we are told, because «rogue states» and terror networks are seeking to acquireweapons of mass destruction. These groups have expressed an intention, they are seeking a capacity. These groups are deserving of preemptive attack not because of actions they have already taken, but because they desire the ability to act, and must be frustrated in that desire. Using Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence,I will link the doctrine of preemption to the need for any legal system to monopolise violence and argue that preemption aims to ensure a ‘sovereign future’ in which the US is the sole party with this capacity to use violence.

The Language of the Camps: Lager, Gulag, CPT

by Luca Guzzetti

According to Wittgenstein, language depends from the form of life of which it’s a part, in other words the language games are a consequence of human relations. At the beginning of Philosophical investigations, Wittgenstein gives the example of a very simple language game, defining it as «a completeprimitive language». Similar language games can be found in the literature regarding concentration camps, Lagers, Gulags. The hypothesis investigated in this paper regards the possibility to use the language games played in specific contexts, to have important evidence regarding the social relations there dominant. As the perfect identity between the languages of Nazi Lagers and Soviet Gulags tells us something about the similar role played by the concentration camps in the two totalitarian regimes, the similar nature of the language games played in the detention centres for migrants in Europe should make us aware of the risks of creating fragments of totalitarian state within democratic political systems.

Bedouins, refugees and migrants. Technologies of mobility, departing from the Jordan Valley

by Mauro Van Aken

In the last half a century, the East Bank of the Jordan Valley has constituted a political laboratory for the location and control of mobility. Several mobile communities have encountered here, from Bedouin tribes obliged to settled in the national incorporation, Palestinian refugees assimilated into a Jordanian development mission of intensive agriculture and Egyptian migrant labourers, who were transformed in few decades from welcomed Arab brothers into «illegal migrants».

These groups faced a new discipline of place of rural development planning linked to the national construction. The agricultural colony has represented the main, although apparently neutral, tool for introducing projects of social engineering in the last century, based on a new control of space, of undisciplined patterns of mobility and on an ‘invention’ of communities. In contrast, the dislocated groups rely on their histories of mobility and on the present dislocated social network in the attempt to build a space of autonomy.

Exceptional times and non-governmental spacings

by Brett Neilson and Angela Mitropoulos

In late April 2003, around 500 people travelled to the newly constructed Baxter detention centre in the South Australian desert for a three-day protest. At the time, Baxter held some 300 detainees, including migrants from Iraq and Afghanistan. The decision to build this highly fortified structure had been made just days after an earlier action, precisely a year before, in which some 50 inmates had escaped from the detention centre at Woomera. In retrospect, it is no exaggeration to claim that Woomera2002 and the September 2000 protests against the World Economic Forum in Melbourne were the most significant local expressions of that congeries of non-governmental actors that, at the turn of the century, composed the so-called movement of movements. Yet, between the protests at Woomera in 2002 and those at Baxter in 2003, little would remain the same. Not only would the new camp involve advanced technologies of surveillance, biometrics and isolation, but during the intervening period, there would occur an increased militarisation of the policing of protests paralleled by the Australian government’s willing participation in the war in Iraq. At the border, politics risks exposing itself to the impolitical, to a sense of movement beyond its conventional socio-political definitions, and to an expression of the political without a sovereign tone. One might say that it is this risk-which is also to say, this chance for a life otherwise-that a migratory politics seeks out. And yet, just as the prospect for movement seems to become ever more limited, such limits are reinforced by nostalgic repetition no less than through the proliferation of borders.

Between Lampedusa and Libya

by Rutvica Andrijasevic

During the past years the temporary holding centre for irregular migrants in Lampedusa has been repeatedly denounced for instances of procedural irregularities and human rights violations. The degrading treatment reserved to third-country nationals, the difficulty in gaining access to the asylum determination process and the large scale expulsions to Libya, brought Lampedusa to the attention of European and international institutions. The European Parliament, the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee all called on Italy to refrain from collective expulsions of asylum seekers and irregular migrants to Libya, and to respect asylum seekers’ right to international protection. Using the material provided by the Italian authorities, European institutions and the NGOs, this study presents an overview of events and policies implemented by the Italian and Libyan governments, the European Union and the International Organization for Migration and outlines the contentions surrounding these policies. The paper argues that the implementation of the detention and return schemes, commonly discussed in terms of the externalization of asylum, does not actually relocate the asylum procedures outside the EU’s external borders but rather deprives asylum seekers of the possibility of accessing asylum determination procedure. The analysis of migratory patterns in Libya further suggests that these policies, implemented to deter irregular migratory flows into Europe and combat smuggling in migrants, might paradoxically result in «illegalizing» the movement of migrants between Libya and neighbouring African states, and in increasing the involvement of smuggling networks. The study ends by raising the issue of the political responsibility of all actors involved, whether they are governments, supranational bodies or agencies, and putting forward policy recommendations for an effective EU framework for the protection of asylum seekers.

Territories, maps, and camps: the post-tsunami in Sri Lanka

by Camillo Boano

The article address a sort of geographical political economy of the tsunami case in Sri Lanka, arguing that this specific event brought into uneasy and troubling focus some of the tensions between interdependent categories that lie at the core of geography: nature and culture; environment, society and development; global interconnection, humanitarianism and the politics of aid; ethics, care and responsibility; knowledge, expertise and empowerment. The study considers the tsunami as a «generative event» able to create new spatialities and temporalities. In terms of spatialities, the tsunami defined some novelties at both at macro and micro level. In macro terms, all the affected countries were unified under the «tsunami affected» label, instead of being conceived as a series of discrete geopolitical units. The relationship between this new «Indian Ocean region» and the «rest of the world» was also re-defined thanks to the outpouring of international aid from across the globe. In micro terms, the aid flow shaped different spaces - no-reconstruction zones, new-relocation sites, townships -, uniqueness of geographical place and personal circumstances were spatialised across the region. On temporalities, the tsunami has brought temporal challenges in and through space. There was a sense in which the clock was zeroed or reset opening a tsunami «era» and calling for an immediate «post», with all the psycho-social meaning of the «tsunami remembering».

Domestic internments

by Francesca Scrinzi

Cet article, basé sur une enquête ethnographique réalisée en Italie, présente les conditions de travail des employé(e)s de maison migrantes à demeure, vues comme un indicateur des articulations entre les rapports sociaux de sexe, de « race » et de classe. Ces derniers sont d’abord analysés à la lumière des liens entre les politiques sociales, d’emploi et d’immigration. Ensuite, ces rapports sociaux sont au coeur de la relation de service domestique. Le travail des employé(e)s de maison à demeure, souvent sans papiers, se caractérise par le brouillement des espaces et des temps de travail et de non-travail, par une disponibilité quasiment totale et par une charge importante de travail émotionnel, qui est rendu invisible. Enfin, sont présentés les modes de mise au travail auxquels font recours les employeurs ainsi que les stratégies par lesquelles les employé(e)s de maison résistent à l’exploitation et leurs parcours de sortie du secteur domestique à demeure.