From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A labor camp is a simplified detention facility
where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor. Labor
camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons. Conditions at labor camps vary widely
depending on the operators.
During the period of Stalinism, the Gulag labor camps in the Soviet Union were officially called
"Corrective labor camps." The term labor
colony; more exactly, "Corrective labor colony",
(исправительно-трудовая колония, ИТК), was also in
use, most notably the ones for underaged (16 years or younger)
convicts and captured besprizorniki (street
children, literally, "children without family care"). After the
reform of Gulag, the term "corrective labor colony" essentially
encompassed labor camps.
Labor camps in various
countries
- The Allies of World War II operated
a number of work camps after the war. In the Yalta conference it was agreed that German
forced labor was to be utilized as
reparations. The majority of the camps were in the Soviet
Union, but more than 1,000,000 Germans were forced to work in
French coal-mines and British agriculture, as well as 500,000 in
U.S.-run Military Labor Service Units in occupied Germany itself.
[1]
- See Forced labor
camps in Communist Bulgaria
- The Communist Party of China has
operated many labor camps for some types of crimes. Many leaders of
China were put into labor camps
after purges, including Deng Xiaoping and
Liu Shaoqi. As a
matter of fact, hundreds - if not thousands - of labor camps and
forced-labor prisons (laogai)
still exist in modern day China, [2] housing
political prisoners and dissidents alongside dangerous
criminals.
- Beginning in November 1965, people classified as "against the
government" were summoned to work camps referred to as "Military Units to Aid
Production" (UMAP).[3]
- After the communists
took over
Czechoslovakia in 1948, many forced labor camps were created.
The inmates included political
prisoners, clergy, kulaks, boyscouts leaders and many other groups of
people that were considered enemies of the state. Most of the
prisoners worked in the uranium mines. These camps lasted until
mid-1950s.
- During World War
II the Nazis operated several categories of Arbeitslager for
different categories of inmates. The largest number of them held
civilians forcibly abducted in the occupied countries (see Łapanka) to provide labor
in the German war industry, repair bombed railroads and bridges or
work on farms. By 1944, 19.9% of all workers were foreigners,
either civilians or prisoners of
war.[4]
- The Nazis employed many
slave laborers. They also operated concentration camps, some of
which provided free forced labor for industrial and other jobs
while others existed purely for the extermination of their inmates. A notable
example is Mittelbau-Dora labor camp complex that
serviced the production of the V-2 rocket. See List
of German concentration camps for more.
- During the early 20th century, the Empire of Japan used the forced labor
of millions of civilians from conquered countries and prisoners of
war, especially during the Second Sino-Japanese War and
the Pacific War, on
projects such as the Death Railway. Hundreds of thousands of
people died as a direct result of the overwork, malnutrition,
preventable disease and violence which were commonplace on these
projects.
- See Creation of the
camps, Great Brăila Island
- North Korea is suspected of holding 154,000 of its citizens,
mostly dissidents, in gulags.[5]
- Imperial Russia operated a system of remote
Siberian forced labor camps
as part of its regular judicial system, called katorga.
- The Soviet
Union took over the already extensive katorga system and expanded it immensely,
eventually organizing the Gulag
to run the camps. In 1954, a year after Stalin's death, the new
Soviet government of Nikita Khrushchev began to release
political prisoners and close down the camps. By the end of the
1950s, virtually all "corrective labor camps" were reorganized,
mostly into the system of corrective labor colonies.
Officially, the Gulag was terminated by the MVD order 20 of January 25,
1960.
- The United States Army recently
declassified a document that "provides guidance on establishing
prison camps on [US] Army installations." [6]
United States
prisons operate like labor camps, according to a comprehensive
University of Massachusetts study. Operating like the labor camps
of communist China, prisons in
at least two states, California and Oregon, are doing "exactly what the U.S. has
been lambasting China for", the report says. It discusses the
similarities in the two countries' prison labor systems. "You might
just as well call this slave labor", the report continues,
explaining that U.S. prison work is not volunteer work since
inmates get time deducted off their sentences for working in the
prison: "If prisoners don't work, they serve longer sentences, lose
privileges, and risk solitary confinement." The report concludes
that there is no "real difference between China's forced labor and
that in the U.S. prison system."[7] The United
States prison system is being called "a new form of inhumane
exploitation." Current penal labor in the U.S., it adds, "has its
roots on slavery." [8].
- See Reeducation camp
- Socialist Yugoslavia ran the Goli otok prison camp for
political opponents from 1946 to 1956.
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