African Unification Front
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CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN THE AFRICAN UNION
There are several types of Concentrations Camps In the African Union:
[1] Illegal or Secret POW Camps & Prison Camps
[2] Officially recognized Internment & Regroupment Camps
Category [1] camps are found in war zones and have been identified in Northern Uganda, Western Uganda (Rwenzori Region), Southern Sudan, and in Zaire (DRC under the administration of General Mobutu).
Category [2] camps are found in Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, and DRC.
Both categories of camps have populations numbering in the hundreds, some have thousands of inmates. Currently the largest ones are in Northern Uganda, with over 40,000 people in one. As a general rule the conditions in the camps are horrific. Inmates are malnurished, without rights and subject to arbitrary punishment by camp guards. There are children as well as adults in these camps, although some camps are known to hold only children, or only men and boys. Inmates consists of politically oppressed minorities, captured dissidents, and poor or indigent people without means.
HISTORY
In the era of International Slavery, Africa was covered with thousands of transit camps where captured Africans spent up to a year waiting for slave caravans to take them to the ports. The slave markets and the slave forts along the African coast could house tens of thousands of captives, sometimes for over a year, in the most cramped and horrifying conditions. Famous camps are found in what is now the DRC, Tanzania (Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika), Goree Island, Mombasa, Zanzibar, and other places.
In post slavery times Secret Prison Camps and concentration camps in the Africa were first used in Cameroon by the Belgians in the 19th century, and then by the Germans in Cameroon at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th centuries. The most famous of these German camps were used in Namibia as method of crushing the Nama and the Herero resistence. Thousands of women and girl inmates were raped and the men killed. Thousands of others died of thirst on escapes routes across the Kalahari. 80% of the nama and the Herero people were exterminated by the German Occupation.
The camps were used by all of the European governments during the colonial occupation, and their use reached its apex during the wars of independence beginning in the 1950s and well into the 1980s. Concentraion camps were used by the Mobutu regime, by the Apartheid Regime in Namibia and South Africa well into the late 1980s. African regimes that used concentration camps include: Ethiopia under Mengistu, and Zaire under Mobutu, and Zimbabwe (used in the 1980s in suppressing Matabele dissent).
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