Ian Campbell (2017).
The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s
National Shame, First Edition. London: Hurst Publishers. ISBN
978-1-849-04692-3. 440 pages. £30.00
The 20th century is often remarked on by
historians to have been one of the most tumultuous periods in human history.
Some would go so far as to assert that it was the most violent century in
modern times. Certainly, the advances in technology ensured that human life
could be destroyed in far greater numbers and with more rapidity. And in an age
of warring empires, colonial repression and the coming to power of regimes
adhering to the ruthless ideologies of totalitarianism, episodes of the mass
murder of innocent civilians are abundant.
The loss of life during the massacre of
Nanking and the bombing of Guernica, for instance, are tragedies that are
emblematic of the troubled times leading to WWII, as are the names of the death
camps and mobile killing units associated with Nazi Germany during that
conflict.
Less well-known, if known at all, is the massacre
which was initiated by Fascist Italy in the Ethiopian city of Addis Ababa in
February 1937. This savage event, staged as a retributive measure, after an
assassination attempt on Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, Benito Mussolini’s viceroy
to Italian East Africa, is essentially a half-forgotten one.
The fact that an atrocity of this magnitude
was not thoroughly documented, dissected and memorialised until recent times
may strike the observer as somewhat surprising.
This amnesia persisted in regard to both perpetrator
and victim. There was no war crimes investigation and little scholarship was
directed at it. The reasons for this are manifold and are revealed by Ian
Campbell in his book The Addis Ababa
Massacre: Italy’s National Shame, the fruit of two-decades of research.
The task of setting out the chronology of
events while striving to maintain accuracy, as well as reaching empirically
valid conclusions pertaining to the controversial matter of an overall death
count was an onerous one.
For instance, the author had to contend with
the large-scale destruction of evidence. This relates both to the destroying of
official records as well as to the physical elimination of Ethiopian witnesses.
Thus, he needed to find alternatives to the
use of archival documents as historiological sources.
Most notably, this involved painstakingly
tracking down and interviewing eyewitnesses over a considerable period of time,
recording their recollections and then embarking on a laborious process of
cross-checking and cross-referencing.
He also assembled and reproduced a vast
array of photographic evidence. Many of the shots were originally published in
Sylvia Pankhurst’s anti-fascist journal New
Times and Ethiopia News, while other previously unpublished ones taken by
foreign diplomats, residents of Addis Ababa, rampaging Blackshirts and Italian
soldiers.
The book captures the world on the precipice
of an enormous conflagration and serves to remind the reader that the outbreak
of WWII had several preludes.
Whereas the Asian prelude is composed of
both the 1931 Japanese invasion of
Manchuria and the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 (with the European prelude
occurring in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland), for Africa, the dawning of that
conflict was marked by the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy in 1935.
The issue of appeasement looms large in the
African context as it did in the European arena. An analogy can be made between
the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia at the 1938 conference in Munich, which
arguably emboldened Adolf Hitler to pursue his objective of further territorial
acquisition, and the failure of the collective security system promised by the
League of Nations in restraining Mussolini’s expansionist ambitions in East
Africa. Campbell’s work may also remind the reader of the degree to which
earlier events on the African continent prefigured the policies followed by the
totalitarian powers prior to and during the war.
For instance, the racial experiments
conducted by Joseph Mengele at Auschwitz were foreshadowed by those carried out
by Mengele’s mentor, Eugen Fischer, on the indigenous population of German
South West Africa (Namibia).
Further, the concentration camp system
established during pre-world war colonial conflicts by the Italians in Libya,
Eritrea and Somaliland was, during the war, extended to Yugoslavia and to Italy
itself.
The war crimes committed by Italian forces
during the Spanish Civil War, and during WWII in Greece and Yugoslavia, were a
continuum of the brutality exhibited during the period of Italian colonisation
of East African territory.
Campbell’s book provides clear and
ineluctable confirmation of fascism’s inherent tendency towards brutality and
violence. The killing of Ethiopians began during the afternoon of Friday 19
February, almost immediately after Graziani was injured by a grenade attack
carried out by two Eritreans, Moges Asgedom and Abriha Deboch.
An
official declaration promulgating three days of vengeance followed soon after
and the author constructs, in harrowing detail, the methodology of revenge.
Guns, knives, pick-axes and truncheons were handed out to ‘repression squads’
consisting of black-shirted militias and Italian civilians, who, working in
concert with armed soldiers and carabinieri,
attacked defenceless Africans.
The victims were stabbed, bludgeoned and
incinerated. Flamethrowers were used to set fire to cottages dotted around
Addis Ababa in which thousands of innocents - defenceless children, women and
the elderly- were immolated. Campbell
estimates that 18-19,000 people were killed in Addis Ababa out of a population
of 100,000.
The merciless and unrelenting nature of the
violence is underlined by the fact that the pogrom continued even after
Mussolini sent word for the killings to stop on the day Graziani had awoken from
his coma.
Graziani ordered Guido Cortese, the local
leader of the Black Shirts, to halt the slaughter. But Cortese had promised his
underlings three days, and so the murders, centred now in the outlying suburbs
where they were not as visible to the party leadership, continued until the
Sunday evening. This marked the first phase of the genocide. The Italian
authorities then targeted Ethiopia’s ‘nobles and notables’. Travelling
‘Caravans of Death’, consisting of portable gallows, were used to hang influential
members of the community including those of the aristocratic class. The author
provides evidence ascertained from the national archives in Rome that this was
not an improvised policy but had in fact been planned in advance. There had
been a stated policy of the fascists to behead the intellectual leadership of
Ethiopia, a cadre of persons specifically selected by Haile Selassie to be
educated in European and North American institutions.
The rounding up and summary execution of
many of this elite who were referred to as the ‘Young Ethiopians’ fulfilled an
order given by Mussolini on 3 May 1936.
Again, it is worth reminding that the
merciless forms of homicidal violence employed by the Italians and their
attendant rationales presaged their implementation by the Fascists and Nazis in the impending war in the European theatre.
The destruction of the social elite –the
‘Young Ethiopians’- with the objective of leaving an occupied population
rudderless and more malleable to subjugation, mirrored the Intelligenzaktion employed by the Nazis in Poland which targeted
Polish teachers, priests and doctors.
Also, the merciless retribution was employed not
only in Addis Ababa, but extended to the ruthless destruction of the priests of
the monastery of Debre Libanos who were suspected of having harboured
Graziani’s assailants.
And of course, the initial invasion of
Ethiopia which featured the merciless aerial bombardment of towns and villages
predated the notorious bombings by the Luftwaffe of republican enclaves in the
Spanish Civil War, during which the Aviazione
Legionaria of the Italian Air Force was responsible for the deliberate
targeting of civilians in Barcelona.
Campbell brings the reader’s attention to
the reasons for Western silence and inaction at the time of the Addis Ababa
Massacre. The evidence he provides shows that information compiled by foreign
diplomats and journalists in relation to the atrocity was actively suppressed
in the futile hope of keeping Mussolini from entering into a military pact with
Hitler.
He also addresses the issue of why figures
such as Graziani and Cortese, who were not made subject to war crimes trials, did
not face the same punishment as the likes of General Hideki Tojo and
SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Karl Hermann Frank did. The answer is simply that the
dawning of the Cold War and the fear that Italy could fall into the hands of
communists meant that figures associated with fascism needed to be preserved.
A war times trial in East Africa along the
lines of the ones in Nuremberg and Tokyo would have been considered impolitic
given that it would in essence have presented a situation where black Africans
were prosecuting white Europeans - an affront to the sensibilities of the time
when most of the black and brown world was still under European colonial rule.
Ethiopia was thus denied membership of the United Nations War Crimes
Commission.
Selassie’s ostensible act of magnanimity in
forbidding reprisals and calling for reconciliation can be understood as a
pragmatic response to British pressure consisting of the threat not to support
Ethiopia in its claims over Eritrea and the Ogaden region if it insisted on
pressing its claim for a war crimes trial. He was also keen to recommence his
programme of modernisation, in regard to which he would need Western
assistance.
The book achieves a great deal. In
overcoming the formidable obstacles related to the destruction of original
sources of information and the passage of time, Campbell puts a lie to the idea
of Italy having governed itself and others through a form of ‘benign’ fascism.
Silvio Berlusconi’s description of the fascist regime’s internment camps as
having been ‘like holiday camps’ does not reflect the brutal circumstances in
operation at the concentration camps to which Ethiopians were sent during the
period of Italian occupation: Danane in the Ogaden region and Nokra in the
Dahlak Archipelago.
The book offers confirmation of high-level
Vatican support for the Italian conquest which many priests considered to be a
‘holy mission’.
For while the rationales for the
colonisation of Ethiopia encompassed the racial doctrine of subjugating a
people considered as being of an inferior race, as well as serving as a revenge
for the Italian defeat suffered in 1897 at the Battle of Adowa, some within the
higher echelons of the Roman Catholic Church considered the Ethiopian Christian
Orthodox Church to be a heretical institution.
This research also exposes a chapter of
Italian history which has been practically expunged. The unexpurgated truth
regarding Italy’s legacy of violent colonial rule in East Africa, as well as
its military adventures in the Balkans, has never been made the subject of
public debate.
Instead a combination of the institutions of
the state, the media and academia has propagated the myth of Italy as having
been solely the victim of fascism. An early indication of the sensitivity about
these matters came in the 1950s when the makers of a film depicting the Italian
invasion of Greece were arrested and jailed.
Also, a 1981 Libyan-financed movie entitled The Lion of the Desert, which depicted
Graziani’s pacification of Libya was banned from Italian cinemas. Academic
inquiry into Italy’s colonial policies is seemingly verboten (forbidden). Historians such as Angelo Del Boca, who have
examined Italy’s colonial crimes, have been subject to obloquy. Italy has in
effect remained a nation in denial. The book puts firmly in the public domain a
ground-breaking work of history that will add to the overall understanding of
how the war impacted on Africa, which for the most part is dominated by
renditions of British battles with Italian and German armies in the North
African desert.
The Addis Ababa
Massacre: Italy’s National Shame is a magisterial work which deserves the
attention of a wide audience as it provides a sober yet spellbinding narrative
of one of the era’s greatest desecrations of humanity.
While some may choose to accuse the author
of being overtly prosecutorial, it would be more accurate to describe it as a
project which sets the record straight. It points the finger and is accusatory
but is by no means defamatory.
That the massacre of Addis Ababa is not as
firmly imprinted in the consciousness of history on par with the massacres of
Katyn, Babi-Yar and Nanking is an injustice, and with this book, Ian Campbell
has played a part in correcting this oversight.
© Adeyinka Makinde (2018)
“Italy’s Ethiopian Massacre Finally Comes to Light” (Book Review of Ian
Campbell’s The Addis Ababa Massacre:
Italy’s National Shame). New African
Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 584 June (2018) 68-71.
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer and law
lecturer based in London, England. He is a geopolitical analyst, historian and
aficionado of boxing. He is the author of the book Dick Tiger: The Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal.
