Enver’s diary entry for 22 October 1912, quoting a ‘letter to a friend,’ says that on the previous day he had received a message from the Italian commander informing him that the two sides were now at peace. Further, during the night of 21-22 October he ‘received a telegram from the War Minister, which ordered me to cease hostilities, as His Majesty the Sultan had signed the peace treaty. You can imagine my thoughts.’ Indeed in the same missive Enver raged that he and his fellow Ottoman soldiers have ‘done our duty in vain, and the new government has destroyed everything again. A shameful peace, and further war with an uncertain end. This is the final result!’ However, despite both his knowledge of the ‘shameful’ peace and the orders from his superiors in Istanbul Enver nevertheless determined on continuing to fight the Italians. His verdict was perhaps spurred on by the similar decision made by the Senussi leader and communicated to him on the same date as he wrote to his unknown friend. Indeed, despite arriving at the decision to continue fighting Enver found himself suffering from ‘an unspeakable inner dilemma.’ In his own words: ‘I cannot abandon this land, but on the other hand I cannot let down my homeland which urgently needs me.’43 Orders from the Ottoman capital reached him on 25 October summoning him home, but despite this direct command he seems to have hesitated. On the other hand news of the disasters visited upon the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans was also reaching him and his understanding of the dire situation there was reinforced on 30 October. He records that on that date, and perhaps with a view to unsettling him, ‘the Italians now had the kindness to send me recent newspapers.’ He concluded after perusing them that ‘the situation in Rumelia seems to be very serious for us.’ Having weighed up the matter, Enver determined that the crisis in the Balkans was of such magnitude that he was bound to travel home to attempt to ease it:
It is increasingly disgraceful and intolerable to be a powerless spectator able merely to watch the deteriorating situation. Despite my wishes and all my pledges I must travel as quickly as possible to Constantinople, where the war for us has taken an unfavourable turn. I am deeply sad, especially because I must remain inactive [untätig].44
The last entry in the diary is dated 8 November 1912, but a postscript states that soon afterwards Enver surreptitiously left Cyrenaica via Egypt, where he was hunted by the police. However, he disguised himself and, ironically, succeeded in boarding an Italian steamship to Brindisi before eventually travelling to the Ottoman capital. This was then a departure completely different from that undertaken by Nesat Bey in Tripolitania, and not only did Enver appoint a successor but some 800 Ottoman regulars also remained. The inheritor of Enver’s command was the circa 34-year old Aziz Ali al-Masri (or Misri), usually referred to as Aziz Bey, an Ottoman officer of Egyptian origin later to become famous as a champion of Arab nationalism.45 He had made an impression on his superiors during the campaign to settle the 1911 Yemeni revolt, not just with his military but also with his political skills; the campaign ended with an agreement in which Aziz Bey had a large part in negotiating.
His tenure as commander in Cyrenaica was relatively short, and during it the first battles of the First Italo-Senussi War were fought. Unlike the Tripolitanian situation, Italian attempts to expand their coastal enclaves were bitterly contested and several battles of the type that characterised the Italo-Ottoman campaign were fought. Given their preponderance of military technology the Italians usually prevailed, but if their progress was painfully slow then it almost came to a complete halt following the Battle of Sidi el-Garbàa (Sidi al-Qarbaa, Sidi Garbàa, Sidi Garba) that took place on 16 May 1913 about 12 kilometres south of Derna.
Details of what happened at Sidi el-Garbàa were suppressed contemporaneously by the Italian government but some reports did leak out. A recently arrived officer of colonial experience (he had survived the Battle of Adua), Major-General Ettore Mambretti, was in command at Derna and intelligence reached him that there were a number of enemy entrenched at Sidi el-Garbàa and nearby Ettangi. He despatched a strong force of infantry, plus the usual supporting arms, divided into three columns. The centre column, consisting of six (some sources say seven) battalions of infantry plus artillery and engineers under the command of Colonel Nicolò Maddalena, was to advance directly onto the enemy position at Sidi el-Garbàa.
The attack began at 03:30 hours following a march through the night without breaks for food or water so that in consequence the troops were tired and weary. Nevertheless their attacks were initially successful inasmuch as they penetrated the enemy entrenchments. The enemy were however present in far greater strength than had been estimated, with the result that Maddalena’s command was then surrounded and had to attempt a fighting retreat back to Derna. According to some press reports the entire operation had been a trap into which the Italians had unknowingly walked. This had been unwittingly triggered by an ‘escaped prisoner,’ appropriately named Angelo Machiavelli, who had been duped into delivering misinformation to the command at Derna. An alternative tale had Machiavelli genuinely escaping and warning his superiors that the enemy was present in strength, but being disbelieved.46
Whatever the truth of the matter, the column was forced to retire in disorder and was harried to the outskirts of Derna, losing most of its artillery and accoutrements into the bargain. The Italian socialist newspaper Avanti! complained about the ‘lying official communications’ and published an account claiming that Italian casualties included 400 killed, 700 wounded and over 100 taken prisoner. Harrowing accounts of the wounded being abandoned also appeared, with one officer, Lieutenant Alfredo Monarelli, quoted as admitting that this was so, but arguing that there was no alternative due to a lack of transport.47 Later scholarship has established that the casualty figures were greatly exaggerated, amounting to some 79 killed, including Colonel Maddalena, and 284 wounded, with an unknown number taken prisoner.48 In the grand scheme of things the affair at Sidi el-Garbàa was a minor affair, but it demonstrated beyond any doubt that the conquest of Cyrenaica was to be a difficult and lengthy business.
The Italians attributed blame on the continued presence of Ottoman officers who remained, despite this being a breach of the Ouchy Treaty. There is no question that some did indeed stay behind, but Aziz Bey left the theatre for Egypt on 23 July 1913 where he was interviewed by the Cairo-based Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. Described as ‘the hero of Benghazi’ he revealed that he would have preferred to remain in Benghazi ‘in order to inflict as much damage as possible upon the Italians because they are my enemy.’ He was compelled to withdraw from the fray however due to a shortage of matériel; ‘I needed ammunition, supplies and money. These things are essential for fighters and I had none.’ The Bedouin tribes came in for high praise for remaining loyal to the cause, but he was much more critical of the Senussi leadership:
Sanusis are like Russian priests – their only interest is in putting food in their mouths. Some of them had already concluded a truce with the Italians while others had stopped fighting them a long time ago […] The misguided policies of the Sanusis forced me to leave the general command to their elders.49
If the populations of Tripolitania and even Cyrenaica were indeed somewhat divided in their loyalties at this juncture, and all the evidence collected by scholars who have studied the matter suggests that this was indeed the case, then from the Italian point of view the situation was advantageous, or at least potentially so. Any student of western colonialism would be well aware that a strategy of divide and conquer, though clichéd, had nevertheless often proved effective. However a combination of internal policy and external shock were to radically change this and trigger what became termed The Great Arab Revolt (La Grande Rivolta Araba).50
One of the things that provoked hatred of the Italians was their seeming refusal to honour their commitment, under the terms of the Ouchy Treaty, to release those removed and incarcerated on the Italian islands; none had been released by January 1913. Those detained for deportation had been chosen in a random and haphazard fashion; they
included males and females, both adult and juvenile. The elderly were not exempt and they came from every, and any, social strata, and even their identities were not established until they arrived at their destinations. Some 1,410 of these unfortunates were exiled on the Tremiti archipelago (Isole Tremiti). By 9 January 1912 it has been calculated that 198 of them had perished from disease, starvation, and cold. Many of these were elderly with 35 of the dead being aged between 60 and 70, seven between 70 and 80, and one aged over 90. Two ten-year old children also perished. Six months later a total of 437 people had died, a death-rate amounting to 31 per-cent of the deportee population on the islands.51
However, of perhaps more immediate concern to those still inhabiting the area claimed by Italy, and the policy that proved effective in providing an impetus towards solidarity against their rule, was the repressive and brutal behaviour of the occupiers. As has been noted (see Chapter Eight), the attitude of the Italians towards the inhabitants had undergone a profound change following the ‘betrayal,’ as they perceived it, of Shara Shatt and this outlook was generally maintained as was the brutality that accompanied it. One group that had constantly opposed the Tripoli venture were the Socialists. Their newspaper Avanti! published a photograph captioned ‘The fourteen strangled in Piazza del Pane’ (I quattordici strangolati in piazza del Pane) following the execution of that number of ‘rebels’ after the Battle of Tripoli.52 These multiple executions in the daily bread market, a place obviously visited by a large number of people, were intended to provide ‘a salutary example’ to others who might be inclined to emulate them.53 Such behaviour was deprecated by those on the left of Italian politics. Arcangelo Ghisleri, atheist, republican, geographer, author and prolific founder of reviews, was coruscating in his criticism:
Can you imagine Garibaldi, instead of Caneva, ordering the ‘clearing of the oasis’ and raising gallows in the Piazza del pane? […] This war in Tripoli has been more fatal for us – morally -than a barbarian invasion. A barbarian wind has devastated and continues to devastate all kinds of minds; it blew unnoticed through the reports of all the large newspapers, no longer distinguishable from each other, all pervaded by the same folly. […] Every elementary desire for justice and integrity was overturned; every abuse and excess was praised and justified in the name of “historical fate”; and anyone from Tripoli who intended to tell the truth was forced into silence and threatened with exile. The Italy of the Tripolists lost every sense of morality. […] Unfortunately every offense to the principles of justice and morality must be paid for! This wretched war will bear fruits of ash and poison. It has already begun to bear them. The frenzy of the massacres, the debasement of human life, the exaltation of savagery, the reinstatement of the gallows (the war has even provided us with this macabre resurrection of our painful past!) will have their repercussions in the homeland.54
Such behaviour is perhaps explicable, though certainly not excusable, given the panic that arose amongst the occupiers following the events of Shara Shatt. That it had not only continued but had become institutionalised – ‘the gallows flourished everywhere in Libya, like ineradicable weeds’55 – was demonstrated by, once again, Avanti! The 5 December 1913 edition carried a series of photographs documenting the hanging of Arabs as carried out by Italian soldiers. The matter was raised by the Socialist deputy, Filippo Turati, in the Italian parliament on 18 December. Turati was unambiguous in his denunciation of the barbarity inherent in the colonial policy of the government.
I heard the King speak, a few days ago, of how the acquisition of Libya by Italy gives us a great mission of civilization, and we have as a first goal to make friends with the people, with respect to religion, property and the family and to let them learn the benefits of civilization. But everywhere I see the shadow of the gallows reaching out […] I wonder if this is really Italy, and if the government knows that Cesare Beccaria was born in Italy.56
The reference to Cesare Beccaria can be construed as a swipe at the claim that Italian colonial rule was at all civilised. Beccaria was an eighteenth century jurist and politician whose name came to be ‘indissolubly linked with opposition to the death penalty and with efforts to create a more reasoned, effective, and humane approach to punishment’ via his 1764 work entitled Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments).57 According to William Schabas, ‘the modern abolitionist movement establishes its paternity’ with Beccaria, and his influence was one of the factors in the abolition of capital punishment in Tuscany, though all of the other pre-unification Italian states retained it.58 Capital punishment had been abolished throughout the unified Kingdom of Italy since 1889, though had been the subject of a general pardon since 1877. However, if Turati’s shafts went home in respect of the more cerebral deputies, they were certainly ineffective in influencing the policies pursued in the colonial sphere.
The raising of such matters by socialists and their ilk was of course attributed to the bleating of the usual suspects. There were though accounts from those that could hardly be so called. One such was an officer of the Bersaglieri, Lieutenant-Colonel Gherardo Pàntano, the commissario del Gebel. As a young officer he had become a prisoner of the Ethiopians following Adua and he later went on to command, as a Lieutenant-General, an Infantry Division during the First World War. He had extensive colonial experience in East Africa and was also something of a scholar and author of several books. His 1910 monograph, Nel Benadir: La Citta de Merca e la Regione Bimal,59 provided virtually the only source for later studies of the social and political organisation, and the resistance against Italian colonialism, of Somali society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.60 Unlike many of his fellow officers, he neither underrated nor despised the tribesmen that Italy claimed to rule, nor did he fail to appreciate the difficulties of campaigning against them should such an eventuality arise. After the event, he recorded meeting in the second half of February 1914 with one of their leaders, Ahmed es-Sunni, who had been willing to reach an accommodation with the Italians:
I found myself in front of a young man of fair complexion, with a sensitive expression that was mild and gentle, almost feminine. […] That young man of such delicate appearance was able to dominate the vast desert and I felt that even with so many forces at my disposal, with my fast motor trucks and my radio equipment keeping me in contact with Tripoli, I was not master of what he was. The silent desert was hostile to us but obedient to him. Whilst for us it was pain and difficulty, he was defended and protected; for us it was all about mystery and danger […] we were prisoners of that immensity where he could move freely.61
Some 17 months after that meeting, on 29 July 1915, he submitted a confidential memorandum to the Colonial Ministry, explaining why, in his opinion, The Great Arab Revolt had broken out:
Our officers demonstrate feelings of great resentment, hostility, and hatred against the Arabs, and do not know how to distinguish between friends and foes, or, rather, between those who we should fight and those we should protect […] They tell you with pleasure amazing things: Arabs found seriously injured are covered in gasoline and burned, or thrown into wells […] others are shot with no other reason than that of a cruel whim. There are officers who boast of personally ordering such executions. There are others that systematically prey on non-rebels, thus feeding Sennusi propaganda in the best possible way. I cannot understand why our officers display such blind ferocity, so much thirst for blood, and so refined a cruelty. […] We take revenge on the Arabs for our errors, our retreats, and the checks we suffer, but the cause of these is not their skill but our ineptitude. Indeed, unable to avenge ourselves on those who obtain such conspicuous results with such little means, we vent our humiliation on the weak and helpless and those unfortunates who look to us for protection. The consequence was that all of those we want to be with us hate us.62
By this time, of course, the external shock to Italian rule had made its impact in the shape of the First World War. Italian participation in the conflict, when it came on 23
May 1915, was not on the side of its allies of 30 years in the Triple-Alliance, but rather on the side of Britain, France and Russia against Austria-Hungary (but not yet Germany). ‘Perfidy, like history does not know’ was how Kaiser Franz Joseph described it. Whether perfidy or not, this political and strategic realignment necessitated a similar operational rearrangement, with Italian forces shifting their focus from the north-west border with France to the north and north-east frontier with Austria-Hungary. Even before this, from about the summer of 1914, the threat of large-scale armed resistance to Italian rule was beginning to manifest itself and by August the Fezzan had become entirely Italian free. The influence of the Senussi in fomenting this resistance is well documented, and of course, as Pàntano was to write, their propaganda had been well underpinned by Italian acts.63
The response to this resurgence of resistance, from the occupiers’ point of view, would have been to crush it. The Italian government however, under the premiership of Antonio Salandra since 21 March 1914, had its eyes fixed elsewhere since the outbreak of hostilities between the Central and Entente Powers. The new Chief of Staff of the army, who had taken office following the sudden death of Alberto Pollio on 1 July 1914, was General Luigi Cadorna. Cadorna was expecting that Italy would honour its commitments to the Triple Alliance and immediately began pressing for measures to be taken in anticipation of this. When he discovered that Italy was to remain neutral he sought an audience with Salandra, and asked what – if war alongside Austria-Hungary and Germany was not going to take place – he should prepare for. Though the politicians had yet to make up their mind, the impression he was given was that Austria-Hungary would be the enemy.64 Cadorna thus had the enormous task of recasting Italy’s long-standing strategic planning; however, upon assuming office he claimed that the ‘serious deficiencies’ that he found with the army were ‘much greater than he had imagined.’65
A Box of Sand Page 39