Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World

by Philip Dwyer

  Deportations and Internment

  In 1928, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, chief of the general staff, became the first governor to rule both Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. In exchange for agreeing to serve in Libya, Badoglio asked for his appointment to last five years, giving him enough time to subdue the resistance and begin developing the colony. Upon arrival, he offered an amnesty for those rebels who laid down their arms, but for those who continued to resist, he warned: ‘I will wage war with powerful systems and means, which they will long remember. No rebel will be left in peace, neither he nor his family nor his herds nor his heirs. I will destroy everything, men and things’. 31 In a February 1929 circular to colonial officials, Governor Badoglio again reiterated the consequences should the ‘population not realize the moral and material benefit of standing with us, submitting voluntarily to our customs, our laws’. If they did not, Badoglio lamented, the Italians would face a ‘perpetual struggle’, sitting atop a ‘powder-keg ready to explode’, and in the end ‘destroy the entire native population’. 32

  In August, Mohammed Idris, the highest ranking Senussi leader, who had fled to Egypt in 1923, named Omar al-Mukhtar his sole representative in Cyrenaica. Al-Mukhtar’s forces and the Italians had been operating under the vague terms of a previously negotiated armistice. When al-Mukhtar withdrew from peace negotiations, Badoglio and his generals accused the insurgent leader of violating the terms of the armistice and, in November 1929, the Italians launched an attack on al-Mukhtar, but did little damage. 33 Emilio De Bono , the Fascist officer who formerly governed Tripolitania but returned to Italy as Vice-Minister of the Colonies, strenuously called for the construction of concentration camps and the bombardment of Mukhtar’s rebel forces with poison gas . 34

  In March 1930, frustrated with the progress of the campaign, Governor Badoglio appointed General Rodolfo Graziani Vice-Governor of Cyrenaica. While Graziani was not a ‘first hour’ Fascist, he became one of the regime’s most trusted, effective, and brutal generals. Moreover, Graziani was the first high-ranking military figure to declare himself as holding ‘decidedly fascist principles’. 35 In a short auto-biographical article published in the pro-imperialist journal Oltremare, Graziani declared himself a ‘fascist from birth’. 36 The promotion of Graziani signalled the beginning of the end for al-Mukhtar’s forces and the inhabitants of the Jebel. De Bono and Badoglio had become convinced that internment of the entire civilian population was the only means of bringing an end to the insurgency. According to Badoglio, the population of Cyrenaica furnished the duar with money, sustenance, and men, all the while informing Omar al-Muktar of the Italians’ ‘every move…and the minute details’ of their military preparations. The matter no longer required ‘a balm’, but rather a ‘surgical action’. ‘I thus admit’, wrote Badoglio, ‘that only the use of force will allow us to cut this Gordian Knot […] The only way forward is above all to isolate the duar from the remaining population and to break the entire network of the organization between the population and the duar. I do not want to hide that the measure is grave, complex, and not certain to succeed immediately’. 37 ‘It is therefore urgent’, Badoglio concluded, ‘that the entire subject population should be herded into a restricted space, in such a way that we can keep suitable watch over the people and maintain an absolute gap between them and the rebels. Having done that, we can then move on to direct action against the rebels…’. 38

  As early as May 1930, the Italians rounded up the populations who lived closest to Italian outposts in the highlands of the Jebel Akhdar and deported them westward to the coast. This action was largely a test run for the massive deportations that would occur the following month. However, before large scale deportations and internment of civilians began, Italian authorities confiscated the vast landholdings, buildings, and livestock of the Senussi religious communities, which provided the central educational, economic, philanthropic, and political structures in Cyrenaica. The property of the Senussi, centered on zawiyas (shrines or lodges), generated considerable income, which Italian authorities believed was funding the resistance. Additionally, the Senussi collected taxes, and generally knit together the various tribes of Cyrenaica. 39 After confiscating these holdings, the Italian authorities deported Senussi leaders to island internment colonies in Italy. Thus, not only was the Senussi state destroyed, but thousands of hectares of Libya’s most fertile land fell into the hands of Italian authorities, and the local economy collapsed. Further exacerbating the plight of the region’s peoples, the Italian military engaged in a systematic campaign to destroy hundreds of thousands of sheep, goats, cows, and camels, which resulted in the loss of eighty to ninety percent of the region’s livestock, devastating a crucial aspect of the subsistence economy of the region for years to come. 40

  The deportations of the civilian population of Cyrenaica excluded approximately 50,000 people living in urban areas and another 15,000 in coastal areas, and a few thousand living in oases. 41 These populations were technically considered sottomessi, meaning they had formally submitted to colonial rule, though Italian officials felt certain that even the sottomessi contributed to the resistance, either out of conviction or fear of retribution. 42 The deportations instead affected the semi-nomadic populations of the highlands, which numbered around 100,000. Beginning in June, the various tribes of the Jebel Akhdar were cleared out of the highlands and sent to camps near coastal cities, to the north and west of the Jebel. However, simply clearing out the highlands proved insufficient for defeating the resistance, as many of the material, financial, and social bonds that connected the civilian population to the resistance remained unbroken. Thus Graziani and Badoglio ordered more radical measures: the transfer of the entire population further away, to the desert and semi-desert areas south of Bengasi and in the Sirtica. 43 Guarded by Eritrean askari, who were ordered to shoot anyone who fell behind, tens of thousands of men, women, children, and the elderly trekked between 200 and as many as 1100 kilometres. There are no records of the number of individuals who died en route. In the new settlements, Graziani recalled, ‘all the camps were encircled by a double line of barbed wire; food was rationed; the pastures reduced and controlled; and exiting the camps was subjected to special permits’. The internees were subjected to ‘severe punishment’ (rigore estremo), ‘without remorse’. Complaining about forms of ‘passive resistance’, Graziani reminded his subordinates, ‘the Government is coldly disposed to reduce the population to the most squalid hunger should it not comply absolutely with orders’. 44

  Thanks largely to this complete removal of the population, not to mention the fence constructed on the Egyptian border, Italy’s war against anti-colonial resistance in Libya finally ended in 1932. Perhaps most significantly, the previous year, the Italian military captured Omar al-Muhktar, the symbol of that resistance, and executed him by hanging in front of 20,000 silent internees at the Soluch concentration camp .

  ‘Ethnic Reconstruction’

  The fundamental justification for Italian colonialism, during both Liberalism and Fascism, was demographic. According to Italian imperialists from at least the early part of the twentieth century onward, Italy was a young nation with an expanding population and a land shortage. 45 The millions of immigrants who had left Italy for the Americas, European nations, and other points demonstrated Italy’s need for colonies. Some anti-imperialists viewed Italian communities abroad as ‘free colonies’, which alleviated unemployment and demographic pressure within Italy, while simultaneously stimulating the economy through remittances. Pro-imperialists, by contrast, viewed mass emigration as an embarrassing national disaster, which sapped Italy’s vitality and shamefully displayed an inability to provide for its own people. However, Italian attempts at using Eritrea, Somalia, and Libya as outlets for mass settler colonialism failed. Few Italians were willing to relocate to colonies that offered uncertain job prospects and risky agricultural schemes. The United States, Latin America, other European nations, and even other places in Africa offered bett
er opportunities. No matter how large the resources the state devoted to developing mass colonialism, Italian colonies never absorbed more than a fraction of Italian immigrants. Indeed, the largest of Italy’s overseas territories could have never supported more than tens of thousands of colonists.

  Mussolini nevertheless consistently maintained that the central justification for colonies was the demographic expansion of the Italian race. In his view, a nation either acquired colonies and expanded, or remained at home to perish. Even in the late-1930s, when the Empire was sucking up a vast portion of national expenditures—without providing any concrete benefits to Italy—the Fascist regime steadfastly pursued the policy of mass colonization as the only hope for Italy’s future. Even some of the most ardent imperialists acknowledged the falsehood of the demographic argument, yet still insisted that Italy’s future depended on mass colonization of Libya and Ethiopia. In a memo to Mussolini, Luigi Federzoni , the founder of the pro-imperialist Nationalist party who served twice as Minister of the Colonies, acknowledged that mass colonization was essentially a ‘political act’ related to foreign diplomacy:The colonization of Libya must be a means more than an end: it must allow us to place a few hundred thousand of our countrymen there who will make a part of Africa’s Mediterranean shores Italian in fact as well as in law. [This is] a problem of colonial politics in that its solution is the only means to guarantee our definitive possession; and [thus it is] a problem of foreign policy. 46

  The public justification for Fascist Italy’s colonial policy was thus based on a myth about mass colonization as a solution to a purported demographic crisis. The real crisis, though it did in fact involve the Italian population, might have been a crisis of nation building. Italy needed a few hundred thousand colonists not for demographic or economic reasons, but because the conquest and settling of these territories would simultaneously make a new kind of Italian and demonstrate to all parties—Italians, Europeans, local populations—that Italy and the Italians were who Mussolini said they were.

  In Cyrenaica then, for the first time really, we see the extreme consequences of the realization of the Fascist vision of demographic expansion and settler colonization, mixed with utopian musings about founding a new civilization: the removal or annihilation of another people. 47 Over and over in his writings, Governor of Cyrenaica Graziani connected the destruction of the people of Cyrenaica to the creation of a new, better civilization. In an undated draft of a speech to be delivered to Fascists on the topic of Cyrenaica, Graziani wrote, ‘nothing new can be constructed if one does not destroy completely or in part a past that no longer belongs in the present’. On the very next page, he reiterated the same thought. ‘The act of destroying’, he proclaimed, ‘is a sad and legitimate reality when it serves to reconstruct humanity upon new foundations’. 48 Like General Badoglio , General Graziani believed that the thing to be destroyed was the population of Cyrenaica, either all or part. 49

  In books and articles from 1933 onward, Graziani regularly and repeatedly insisted that he went to Cyrenaica without intentions of inflicting violence or repression on the general population. Therefore, Omar al-Mukhtar and his supporters were at fault. Such justifications, by any Italian authority, ignored one simple fact: the peoples of the Jebel Akhdar would have been removed from the region whether they resisted or not. Indeed, the Jebel was the most fertile land in Cyrenaica, and the camp inmates would never return to it, for it was reserved for Italians. Once the internment camps had been established, colonial officials produced a series of reports, orders, and colour-coded maps that all referred to the ‘Ethnic Reconstruction of Cyrenaica’, a massive resettlement of the tribes of the Jebel. In one report, Graziani wrote, ‘all of the ethnic groups of Cyrenaica have been relocated to the territories they inhabited prior to their concentration in the desert of Sirtica and in the south of Benghazi, with the exception, of course, of the areas of the highlands of the Jebel reserved for the activities of the State Agency for Colonization, which must remain clear of the native populations’. 50 Groups that were allowed to returned to the Jebel were given, or returned to, lands on the margins, which were least suitable to agriculture. Official justifications for this land grab referred mainly to the Bedouins poor stewardship of the land and, more generally, a virulent antipathy toward nomadism. Graziani considered nomadism an ‘imminent danger’ that had to be ‘controlled and checked’. The caravans of the nomad ‘could be compared to that of a swarm of destructive locusts’. Moreover, their uncivilized, rebellious nature led inevitably to anti-colonial resistance. As such, Graziani wrote:the nomads have no justification and no right to insist on remaining in…the Cyrenaican Jebel…rather they must be excluded from it forever, leaving the place to the thousands and thousands of Italian arms that stretch out to it, anxious to till and enrich this ancient Roman land. The nomads must instead be situated in the territories of the pre-desert boundary, which are also largely conducive to pastoralism and sowing…But even in this case, their movements, their sustenance, their settlements must be strictly controlled by government officials and troops…. 51

  Had the population of Cyrenaica not resisted the Italians militarily, they would have still lost their land. Either the Italian government would have paid them well below market value, as occurred in Tripolitania , or had they refused to sell, they would have had their land confiscated. 52 As Wolfe has noted, ‘the reproach of nomadism renders the native removable. Moreover, if the natives are not already nomadic, then the reproach can be turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy through the burning of corn or the uprooting of fruit trees’. 53 The highlands of Cyrenaica, much like the rest of the best cultivatable land in the Italian Empire, was reserved for Italian colonialists, whose presence in the colonies would transform a territory that Italy possessed on paper into a true Italian colony.

  In addition to ending the resistance and facilitating the appropriation of fertile land for Italian colonists, colonial authorities also intended the camps to discipline and shape new colonial subjects. ‘Ethnic construction’ was thus partly about reconfiguring the ethnic geography of Cyrenaica, and partly about engineering a different kind of population. The regime had always viewed the nomadic peoples of Cyrenaica as atavistic, lawless, and subversive, and so the camps became part of a larger goal of settling the population. The camp system was three-tiered, consisting of regular ‘concentration camps ’, which held civilian populations; ‘punishment camps’ (campi di punizione), which interned individuals, families, and groups who resisted the Italian occupation in any way; and ‘reeducation camps’ (campi di rieducazione), which held children taken from families interned in other camps in order to create a class of functionaries loyal to Fascist colonial authorities. 54 Thousands of children, many of them the offspring of insurgent fighters, received special rations and were taught to honour and respect Italy and its Duce. Boys were taught lesson in agricultural techniques and received pre-military training, and girls were taught to cook, clean, and sew. 55 The reeducation camps continued to function long after the other camps had been dismantled. The camp schools also produced many of the recruits for the Libyan battalions who would be deployed in Fascist Italy’s next colonial conquest, the invasion of Ethiopia. 56

  In public, Graziani insisted that life in the camps represented an improvement in the Bedouin standard of living. Speaking to Italian and foreign journalists in June of 1931, the military governor refuted the notion that ‘the transfer of these populations’ constituted a ‘special form of oppression and vexation’. The deportations had brought ‘no radical change’ and ‘no disruption’ to their lives. ‘Just as they lived in tents before’, Graziani opined, ‘they now live in them in new settlements’. Graziani insisted that these new settlements were not ‘true concentration camps ’, because real camps take ‘stable populations living in populated centers’ and gather them in a ‘specific location’. In this case, Graziani informed the public, the Italian military was transferring ‘nomadic populations that preserve, in t
heir new environment, their same routines of life, though they are circumscribed and controlled’. ‘And whether they live on the Jebel or on the coast of the Mediterranean’, concluded Graziani, ‘it’s the same thing’. In fact, in their new location, he added, ‘the nomadic populations can more easily benefit from state provisions related to welfare, the economy, and sanitation that before, due to their constant transmigrations, they were not able to receive’. 57

  Graziani’s assurances aside, high rates of mortality, executions, torture, rape, widespread disease (especially typhus), and other deprivations have been thoroughly documented. 58 Even the regime’s own internal documentation illustrated the devastating impact of the camps, particularly as colonial authorities began contemplating releasing the internees. One provincial commissioner stationed on the Jebel wrote to Graziani’s second-in-command, ‘Your Excellency knows and understands the miserable conditions to which the populations of Cyrenaica have been reduced’. 59 In the Soluch concentration camp , officials deemed several groups incapable of providing for themselves. One ethnic group (‘Awaqir’) had relied previously on pastoralism, but had suffered a ‘significant decrease’ in the size of their herds and had no land upon which to grow grains. Another group (‘Abid-Orfa’), who had previously relied on pastoralism and gathering firewood, had no means of sustenance because their herds had been reduced to an ‘insignificant number’ of animals. 60 The same official, looking beyond the dissolution of the concentration camps , hoped that the regime would begin a campaign of ‘attraction and penetration in the settlements’, which should be led by an official who does not ‘limit his activity to pure control, but also works to promote every economic and commercial activity in this province’. He noted that ‘the mentality of the old officials, persuaded by the routine established during ten years of rebellion’ considered ‘the native settlement only as an entity to be guarded, ignoring the economic and social life’. 61