Guantanamo was a law-free camp for Haitian refugees before the war on terror

Evidence

It is useful to recall that before it became an interrogation centre for terror suspects in the 1990s, Guantanamo Bay held Haitian refugees who were declared to pose an HIV threat. The Clinton administration attempted to justify the inhumane treatment meted out to these refugees on the grounds that Guantanamo was a law-free zone. The ‘war on terror’ did not mark the beginning of a resurgence of camps or the spread of camp logic. Indeed, when, in 1995, Zygmunt Bauman posed the question of whether or not the twentieth century would be remembered as ‘the age of camps,’ he had in mind Auschwitz, the Soviet Gulag, the Rwandan genocide, refugee camps, and prisons in the United States with their ever-growing populations of colour and their increasing suspensions of prisoners’ rights. … Similarly, Giorgio Agamben, in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), analyses the stadium in Baril (where Italian police rounded up illegal Albanian immigrants in 1991 before deporting them) as a camp. Agamben’s examples include airport detention centres for refugees and the camps into which the Weimar government rounded up Jews. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 45

It is useful to recall that before it became an interrogation centre for terror suspects in the 1990s, Guantanamo Bay held Haitian refugees who were declared to pose an HIV threat. The Clinton administration attempted to justify the inhumane treatment meted out to these refugees on the grounds that Guantanamo was a law-free zone. The ‘war on terror’ did not mark the beginning of a resurgence of camps or the spread of camp logic. Indeed, when, in 1995, Zygmunt Bauman posed the question of whether or not the twentieth century would be remembered as ‘the age of camps,’ he had in mind Auschwitz, the Soviet Gulag, the Rwandan genocide, refugee camps, and prisons in the United States with their ever-growing populations of colour and their increasing suspensions of prisoners’ rights. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 45

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes Agamben’s expansion of ‘camp’ to stadiums, airports, and detention centres well before Auschwitz.
• XREF: Directly instantiates the ‘age of camps’ framing — connects to the reader’s deep interest in sacrifice and ritual sites of exception, and to the Somatics of legal exception.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the war on terror did not begin the camps — that Guantanamo, AIDS-refugee detention, Weimar roundups, and US prisons of colour form one continuous century-long ‘age of camps’ — resists easy summary and reframes the present as continuity rather than rupture.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 45