Libyan genocide

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The Libyan genocide, also known in

This period was marked by a brutal campaign characterized by widespread major Italian war crimes, including ethnic cleansing, mass killings, forced displacement, forced death marches, settler colonialism, the use of chemical weapons, the use of concentration camps, mass executions of civilians and refusing to take prisoners of war and instead executing surrendering combatants.^[3] The indigenous population, particularly the nomadic Bedouin tribes, faced extreme violence and suppression in an attempt to quell Senussi resistance to colonial rule.^[2] The Italian military killed half of the Bedouin population of Libya between 1928 and 1932.^[8]

The genocide was based on a racist and fascist colonial plan to settle poor Italian peasants in Libya and crush the resistance of the Senusiyya, led by Omar al-Mukhtar. About 110,000 Libyan civilians were forced to march from their homes to the harsh Libyan desert and were then interned in Italian concentration camps in Libya. Between 60,000 and 70,000 mostly rural people, including women and children, and their 600,000 animals died of diseases and were starved to death.^[2] Rochat estimates that 90 to 95% of the sheep, goats, and horses, and possibly 80% of the cattle and camels, died by 1934.^[1] The annihilation of animals to a semi-nomadic people condemened the population to famine.

News about the genocide was heavily suppressed by

The Libyan Genocide also has a direct link to the Holocaust, as the death camps were visited by Nazi notables like Himmler and Goering.

Etymology

In Libya, the death in the camps during the genocide is commonly referred to as "Shar" (

During the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, the Italians were portrayed as the liberators of Libya from Ottoman rule, concurrently concealing any evidence of repression campaigns and massacres during the war, such as the ones following the battle and massacre at Shar al-Shatt. On the other side, the Arabs were described as 'beasts' that needed to be civilized by the Europeans.^[12] Reportedly, both Italian officers and men had declared that "we must destroy the Arabs". Official reports into the atrocities emphasized racial hatred, vindictiveness and "psychological flaws" as their underlying causes. Such brutal Italian war crimes in Libya were primarily associated with the Fascist era, as well as the Italian Liberal regime, albeit in a less systematic manner.^[13] Upon gaining entry in Libya, Italy promptly initiated racist and discriminatory practices of class division, including the construction of concentration camps, where approximately 50,000 Libyans lost their lives during the 1930s. Libya was of strategic importance to Italy, thus prompting the latter to annex the former as its "Fourth Shore" to allow Italians an expanded trade route area which greatly benefited Italy.^[14]

Motivation

Italy's colonisation of Libya was motivated by a desire to compete with other European powers, who had their own colony. Libya was one of the last African countries to be colonised, along with Abyssinia. Additionally, Libya was viewed as the Fourth Shore, Mussolini's concept of the a Greater Italy that harkens back to the Roman Empire. Libya in other words was viewed as a settler colonial state, akin to French Algeria.^[15]

Italo Balbo, field marshal and an architect of the colony, planned on settling 500,000 Italians by 1950,^[1] particularly in the Jebel Al-Akthar region ("Green Mountains" in Arabic) by displacing the local Libyan population to the desert. Jebel Al-Akthar was chosen for settlement as it is a fertile region in an otherwise dry location, providing conditions for agriculture.^[16]

Death Marches

The most common case of forced displacement was from the Jebel Al-Akthar region, to make way for Italian settlers, to Sirte, an inhospitable city on the edge of the Sahara desert. There were also several displacements from oases to the Sahara desert proper; such as such as the Magharba, and Zuwayya, Fawakhir, Firjan, and Hussun tribes who lived near Ijdabiyya, west of Benghazi. These displacements were harsh with a high mortality rate, done under the coercion of the Italian Army who were given orders to kill any person or animal who did not hurry. These arduous marches, if survived, took Libyans to their final destination in one of the main 16 concentration camps. Coupling these marches with the mass famine that was induced by the intentional killing of nearly all cattle, drove many to die.^{[citation needed]}

One of the most documented is the deportation of the Marmarica tribes and the Butnan tribes in the Jebel Al-Akthar region to Sirte, in a grueling forced walk of 657 miles. The final destination were concetration camps built in Sirte, a city chosen for its remoteness and inhospitability. There was also the case with the Abaidat tribe, who were forced to march in the winter season for a long distance of 1,100 kilometers to the concentration camp of Braiga in the Sirte desert region.^{[citation needed]}

Death Camps

The colonial state spent 13 million Italian liras on the construction of the camps. There were over 16 major camps, the most significant being Agaila, Slug, Braiga, and Magrun, where 65% of the deported were interned. Historian Ali Abdullatif Ahmida places the number of interned, in his lowest estimate, at 110,000 and the numbers of deaths at 60,000. Libyan historian al-Barghathi places the death toll higher – at between 50 and 70,000.^[1]

Evans-Pritchard, an expert on Cyrenaica (Barqa), wrote, "In this bleak country, in the summer of 1930, 80,000 men, women, and children, and 600,000 beasts were herded into the smallest camps possible. Hunger, disease, and broken hearts took a heavy toll of the imprisoned population. Bedouins died in a cage. Loss of livestock was also great, for the beasts had insufficient grazing near the camps on which to support life, and the herds, already decimated in the fighting are almost wiped out by the camps."^[17]

Braiga concentration camp, which held 30,000 interned individuals. Of the 30,000, a mere 13,000 came out alive in 1934, according to Libyan Arabic sources. Most of the interned came from the ‘Abaidat and Magharba tribes.^[2]

Agaila was the most brutal, especially constructed for the families of rebels. The main tribes sent here were the Awaqir, Mnifa, Masamir, Qut’an, and Abadlla tribes. Arabic sources state the total number of the interned was 20,000, and only one-third of them survived the ordeal by 1934.^[1]

It was in Slug camp that Omar al-Mukhtar was hanged in front of 20,000 interned civilians, to send a message to the native people, on September 11, 1931. A shrine to commemorate Omar al-Mukhtar is found there today, after a Libyan located his body by witnessing al-Mukhtar's secret burial by the Italians after he was hung.^[18]

Magrun camp interned 18,000 from the Bra’sa, Dressa, and ‘Urufa tribes. According to Libyan Arabic sources, only half of those imprisoned remained alive by 1934. Those interned were forced to walk hundreds of miles from Toubruq to Susa and then to Magrun. In the Magrun concentration camp a "school" was set up for parents to enroll their children in. The parents were incentivised to give their children over to be provided food, a choice many made during the famine. Thousands of these children became colonial soldiers and were used by the colonial military to fight as cheap labor in the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The number of these young soldiers started at 12,000 and had increased to 40,000 by 1940 when they were sent to fight in one of World War II's major battles along the Libyan–Egyptian border.^[1]

The Swani al-Tariya camp is the most historically documented, with a 70-page record found that details the interned civilians names. Over 500 families were interned here and the majority were from ‘Urufa, Dressa, Fuwakhir, and Bra’sa tribes.^[1]

Genocide

On 20 June 1930, Italian military officer Pietro Badoglio called for the annihilation of the entire population of Cyrenaica, and wrote to General Rodolfo Graziani: "As for overall strategy, it is necessary to create a significant and clear separation between the controlled population and the rebel formations. I do not hide the significance and seriousness of this measure, which might be the ruin of the subdued population...But now the course has been set, and we must carry it out to the end, even if the entire population of Cyrenaica must perish".^[19]

According to Melvin Page and Penny Sonneberg, Benito Mussolini was the person ultimately responsible for "putting 80,000 Libyans in concentration camps, blocking and poisoning wells, building a network of garrisons in troubled areas, bombing villages with mustard gas, killing and confiscating hundreds of thousands of sheep and camels, and constructing a 200-mile barbed wire fence between Libya and Egypt to prevent rebel border crossings".^[14]

By 1931, more than half of the population of Cyrenaica were confined to 15 Italian concentration camps where many died as result of overcrowding, lack of water, food and medicine. The Italian government experimented poison gas in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol against chemical and biological warfare. Badoglio had the Air Force use chemical warfare against the Bedouin rebels in the desert. This caused the nomadic way of life of the Bedouin to decline. Cyrenaica had a population of about 200,000 in 1911 during the Ottoman period, however it declined to 142,000 by 1931, with 40,000 dead and 20,000 in exile in Egypt.^[19] Historian Ilan Pappé estimates that between 1928 and 1932 the Italian military "killed half the Bedouin population (directly or through disease and starvation in camps)."^[8] Italian colonial authorities committed ethnic cleansing by forcibly expelling 100,000 Eastern Libyan Bedouins, half the population of Cyrenaica, from their settlements that were given to Italian colonist settlers.^[20][21] Less than 40,000 Libyan survivors left Italian refugee camps, following their release in 1934.^[12]

The intentional killing of cattle to a semi-nomadic population was especially destructive, similar to the targeted destruction of buffalo in America. General Graziani, who was charged with war crimes but never prosecuted, boasted about this destruction in eastern Libya. He admitted that the livestock of Barqa was reduced to a critical point that required the import of 160,000 animals from western Libya in 1933–1934.^[1]

Links to the Holocaust

There are ample direct connection between the Libyan genocide and the Holocaust. Italian-sponsored Arabic language publications, most notably "Libya al-Musawara", and films from the colonial period indicate numerous visits to Libya by officials from Nazi Germany. Historian Ali Abdullatif Ahmida stated that the extreme violence carried out against Libyans by Italian fascists served as a blueprint for the atrocities that Nazi Germans later committed in Europe.^[4]

In April 1939, Nazi German Field Marshal Hermann Göring made an official visit to Tripoli, where he held discussions with the Italian colonial governor general of Libya, Italo Balbo. Upon witnessing the cleansing of indigneous people and the settling of 20,000 Italian peasants, he described the process as "successful", a key topic for Nazi leaders who had a plan to settle 15 million Germans in Eastern Europe.^[22] Hermann Göring would later be in charge of the first ever concentration camp in the Holocaust.

Also in 1939, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the architect behind the concentration camps, also made an official visit to Libya to witness the outcomes of the Italian methods. He is credited with conceiving the idea of the Final Solution.^[4]

Historian Patrick Bernhard notes that the Nazi Commissariat organised special programmes to visit the Libyan colony. Visits to Tripoli occurred in 1937 and 1938 by high Nazi leaders such as Robert Ley, Rudolf Hess, the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler, and Marshal Hermann Göring. This led to the signing of an agreement to train 150 SS officers in the Italian Colonial School in Tivoli or Rome in 1937. Additionally, German state officials began an active program of fieldwork, examining the Italian colonial experience, contacting Italian officials and conducting fieldwork visits to Italy and the colony of Libya between 1938 and 1941, with numerous German books and press articles published during this time.^[23]

Upon the aftermath of the genocide (1929–1934), 40 villages, aided by scientists, geologists, and agronomists, were built for Italian settlers. The plan was for the arrival of 20,000 Italian settlers on October 28, 1938, who were to be settled in Libya and given the stolen land of the native people. Many German high officials, including the German labor attaché in Rome, were invited to travel with the ships that carried settlers with tremendous fanfare and propaganda by the Italian Fascist state.^[24]

Death toll

After coming to power in Libya in 1969, Muammar Gaddafi claimed that half of Libya's total population had died during Italian colonialism, amounting up to 750,000 Libyans.^[6][25] During the Allied administration of Libya prior to independence, the United Nations estimated that 250,000 to 300,000 Libyan natives died under the Italians between 1912 and 1942.^[6] According to historian Denis Mack Smith, about 20,000 Libyans died in concentration camps, and perhaps 100,000 nomadic Bedouins (half the Bedouin population) died overall.^[6] Ali Abdullatif Ahmida estimates that 500,000 Libyans were killed out of a total population of 1,500,000.^[7]

An exact number of victims of the genocide can not be determined because there are very few remaining documents on death marches and concentration camps in Italian archives. This is due to the fact that evidence regarding the genocide was largely destroyed by Italian colonial authorities. Additionally, news about genocide was heavily suppressed by the Italian state.^[2]

Legacy

The primary legacy is the reframing of colonial history, seeing events that happened in Africa as a precursor to the abuses of the totalitarian regimes in Europe in particular Nazi Germany.

Hannah Arendt would be the first notable thinker to provide a link between colonial genocide in Africa and the Holocaust, describing the abuses during the Scramble for Africa as “Some fundamental aspects of this time appear so close to the totalitarian phenomena of the twentieth century that it may be justifiable to consider the whole period a preparatory stage for coming catastrophes".^[26] Although Arendt's focus was primarily on Belgian Congo, it is this idea that has been further followed up in recent scholarship like in "Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History" by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida and Patrick Bernhard in “Borrowing from Mussolini: Nazi Germany’s Colonial Aspirations in the Shadow of Italian Expansion”.^[23]

Noam Chomsky supports this hypothesis and upon examing the recent scholarship has said “This shattering study, based on remarkable scholarship, not only brings to light the long-suppressed genocidal policies of the Italian Fascist state but also leads to serious rethinking of how colonial history is framed and of the origins of the horrendous Nazi crimes".^[27]

References