Ghosts from South Africa
by Meron Benvenisti (15 March 2004)

A hundred years ago, in winter (summer, in that hemisphere) 1901, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, commander of Britain's imperial forces in South Africa, launched a wide-reaching policy of closures and crackdowns, with the aim of liquidating Boer (Afrikaner) terrorists who refused to succumb after being vanquished on the battlefield, and had initiated a guerrilla war against their conquerors. Conquered lands in South Africa were divided into zones surrounded by intimidating checkpoints and watchtowers. Tens of thousands of British soldiers combed and cleansed these zones: farms, villages and crops were razed and destroyed and the non-combatant population (women and children) were sent to concentration camps (the etymological roots of the term stem from this context, not the Nazi camps). Some 20,000 inhabitants of these camps, of a total population of 120,000, perished from hunger and disease.

The enlightened world (insofar as such a community existed at the start of the 20th century) watched, and was aghast at the barbaric acts perpetrated by the army of a state which feigned adherence to humanitarian norms and values. Expressions of revulsion didn't influence the British government, which claimed that it was acting in self defence and that it was the terrorists who transgressed the rules of war. The Boers (who themselves were hardly saints) surrendered in the end. But not too many years passed before they emerged as the true victors—they became masters of all of South Africa, until the establishment of the current multiracial state.

But Lord Kitchener's closure and crackdown was swamped by the sea of blood that washed across the globe in the twentieth century, and was almost forgotten. When compared to the acts of genocide, annihilation of entire populations, and other horrific atrocities that have transpired since that time, the remote events of 1901 appear almost like routine police activities. Yet, even then, troubled parts of the enlightened world responded to the contemptible acts by trying to promulgate behavioural norms, prohibitions and punitive measures which would deter, or at least condemn, those who committed such crimes.

Those who formulated the Hague convention of 1907 denounced Kitchener's encirclement and closure policies, stipulating that a conqueror shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country, (article 43) and condemning collective punishment procedures, asserting, no general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible (article 50).