History records that the first concentration camp opened for business in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, when 200,000 Cubans would die in the appalling conditions. So Camp X-ray, at Guantanamo Bay, where the US is herding captured Taliban and those accused of involvement with al-Qa'ida, is appropriately situated.

Thereafter, concentration camps became fashionable. The British used them during the South African war, shoving great numbers of non-combatants from the Transvaal and Cape Colony behind barbed wire. In the Soviet Union, by 1922 there were 23 concentration camps for the incarceration of people dubiously accused of espionage and counter-revolution. These camps would evolve into the Gulag. And after Pearl Harbor, the US interned more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans in camps in the interior.

Yes, there have been infinitely worse places than Philip Ruddock's camps. Slave labour camps. Death factories. Nonetheless, branding Woomera a concentration camp is hard to challenge.

While the lines blur between jails, prisons, detention camps, re-education camps, prisoner-of-war camps and other internment centres, a concentration camp is different because the people therein tend not to be criminals. They are not serving a term but are rounded up because of their race, religion, beliefs. They're confined by the state by executive decree rather than due process.

Joel Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot have published a history of the concentration camp. Yet to be translated, it's called La Siecle des Camps and calibrates the various forms of detention. First and foremost, a concentration camp is a place for people who are in prison not for what they have done but for who they are. Such camps are built not for individual offenders but for any category of people who are judged to be dangerous or extraneous to society.

Like the Dunera boys, the people in our camps aren't guilty of any crime; they are fleeing war, suffering, tyranny and death. They're non-combatants who might have expected to be welcomed as allies but are treated as the enemy.

The treatment in our camps, even for women and children, is harsh and unsympathetic. Inmates are known by numbers, not names – one step up from tattooing numbers on their arms. If they escape, people offering them safe haven can be sent to prison for up to 10 years.

Woomera is a place where protests are met with brutality. Where people are being driven insane. It's a place of helplessness, of hopelessness. So if it's not a concentration camp, what the hell is it? An international disgrace, certainly an outrage that cannot be tolerated in a democratic nation.

Once more, Australia has concentration camps and is building more. Yes, concentration camps. If the cap fits, wear it. Or you might like to toss your hat in the ring and oppose what we're doing to refugees. Write to Australians for Just Refugee Programs, c/o Phillip Adams, Elmswood, Gundy, NSW 2337, or contact me by email.

mailto:philadams@ozemail.com.au