Pope Francis stood by yesterday his recent criticism of overcrowded refugee facilities, in which he compared them to concentration camps.
“It was not a lapsus linguae (slip of the tongue). There are refugee camps that are true concentration camps,” he said in a press conference on his return flight from his two-day visit to Egypt.
Many people are confined in these camps, he said, stating: “Simply the fact of being confined and to be able to do nothing is a camp.”
The Pope on April 22, during a special religious service on Tiber Island in Rome, stated that “many refugee camps are concentration camps due to overcrowding”.
Some Jewish groups – referencing concentration camps set up by Nazi Germany – criticised the Pope’s statement, while others found the reference legitimate.
In addition to the Nazis – who created slave labour and extermination camps in the 1930s and 40s – the British set up concentration camps from 1900-1902 to hold the families of enemy combatants in the Second Boer War, while the US set up so-called “relocation centres” – some of them in deserts and swamps – for its Japanese residents in response to Imperial Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Pope Francis: It was not a lapsus linguae. There are refugee camps that are true concentration camps.
