by Philip Dwyer
Despite acknowledging the complete inability of the internees to provide for themselves, the quashing of the resistance led colonial authorities to begin looking ahead to a brighter future for the inhabitants of Cyrenaica, all made possible by the camps. Writing to General De Bono, Graziani explained that the concentration camps were preparing ‘for a new tomorrow a more docile population, habituated to work, who will surely bond itself…to the new territories to which it has been transferred, losing the habit of nomadism and acquiring the tastes and needs of a sedentary population, upon which the programme of pacification and development of Cyrenaica must necessarily be founded and sustained’. 62 Their future prosperity depended entirely on their being submissive in the face of Italian authorities. Graziani, on the eve of the dissolution of the camps, promised, ‘The native populations, reduced to full obedience, will swiftly deliver themselves to a future of civic prosperity without precedent’. 63 One of the roles envisioned for these newly settled, former nomads was to work on roads and other public works projects implemented by the colonial regime. In a September 1933 article titled ‘From the Ethnic Normalization to the Economic Reconstruction of Our Colony’, the newspaper La Cirenaica declared that the dissolution of all of the concentration camps marked the completion of ‘the ethnic reconstruction of Cyrenaica’, reporting that ‘ten thousand natives are already working on the roads of the Jebel and the Marmarica [region] with various agencies’. 64
The Italian authorities primary goal was thus not the physical annihilation of the entire population. Instead, in accordance with the ‘logic of elimination’, Italian colonial authorities objected primarily to the Bedouins being members of tribes, who occupied lands, practised agriculture, engaged in trade, and established religious institutions. 65 Once these markers of permanence were destroyed—land occupancy/ownership, religious institutions, grazing rights, animal husbandry—these Bedouin tribesmen could remain in the colony. That many resisted, and so effectively, meant that Italian authorities pursued a policy of physical removal and annihilation, at least up to the point that the resistance was broken and the Bedouin tribes became an undifferentiated mass of colonial subjects, suitable for new roles in the new Italian colonialist society.
Conclusion
By many definitions, what the Italian military did in Libya in the early 1930s constituted genocide . 66 Understanding this moment in the history of Italian Fascism, not to mention Cyrenaica, is important for many reasons. First, but not foremost, scholars have known about the internment of the civilian population for decades, but this episode in the history of Fascism has generally been treated as a marginal event, belonging to a separate line of investigation from the mainline or ‘real’ history of the Mussolini regime. Studies of Fascist crimes, camps, and atrocities in East Africa, North Africa, the Balkans, and other places have not yet significantly altered historical or popular perceptions of the Fascist regime—that is, most people think that Fascism ‘wasn’t that bad’. Moreover, this line of research has not really changed scholarly interpretations of the nature of Italian Fascism. In this chapter, I have suggested that empire and violence were central to the Fascist project—atrocity in the colonies constituted the imperial regime and colonial identities. Constrained by innumerable forces at home, Fascists found outlets for realizing their totalitarian fantasies abroad. If the making of Italy failed to make Italians, and the Fascist ‘Revolution’ failed to make Fascists, then perhaps the violent conquest of an empire would make Italians truly Fascist.
Second, though the historical field of twentieth century Europe has been saturated with studies about violence (Nazi, Soviet, Allied, Francoist, and so forth), few of them even mention this not insignificant event, or really any episode in Italian Fascism’s long history. It might be an exaggeration to say that the genocide in Cyrenaica was unprecedented, but it certainly was extraordinary. Most historians of Europe assert or imply that Fascist Italy had little blood on its hands. Mussolini operated a mildly repressive police state, they claim, and was never really sincere about his anti-Semitism. 67 This claim, aside from being historically misleading, does an enormous injustice to the history of Libya and the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people whose lives were ended or forever scarred by Italian colonialism. One could certainly argue that the genocide in Cyrenaica had less to do with Fascism and more to do with the nature of modern European colonialism. However, leaving it out of the investigative framework for understanding Italian Fascism implies something profoundly insulting. It suggests that although Fascist Italy may have killed and interned large numbers of people, the regime did not kill people who really mattered.
Viewing Italian colonial policy in Cyrenaica through the framework of violence distils the Fascist regime’s strategies, actions, and ideology down to their essence. The Italian colonial authorities’ use of military, economic, cultural, and social or ethnic violence functioned not simply to defeat the Bedouins’ resistance and take possession of their land, but also to destroy and refashion anew the people of Cyrenaica. Throughout the ‘re-conquest’, colonial officials acknowledged over and over that their policies might lead to the destruction of the entire civilian population. Though acceptable, this dire outcome did not exactly materialize. However, the Fascist regime’s policies deliberately and successfully followed the ‘logic of elimination ’, annihilating the economy, culture, and social practices of the region’s people. By the time the regime established the concentration camps , colonial authorities could begin talking about the ‘ethnic reconstruction of Cyrenaica’. Official maps and documents related to this ‘reconstruction’ referred most explicitly to the geographic placement of the peoples of Cyrenaica, but another, very prominent policy motive, and layer of rhetoric, was the larger project of creating submissive colonial subjects through atrocity.
Notes
1.Giorgio Rochat, ‘La repressione della resistenza in Cirenaica, 1927–1931’, in Giorgio Rochat (ed.), Guerra italiane in Libia e in Etiopia. Studi militiari 1921–1939 (Paese: Pegasus, 1991), 93–97.
2.Badoglio to Graziani, June 20, 1930; published in Giorgio Rochat, ‘La repressione della resistenza araba in Cirenaica nel 1930–31, nei documenti dell’archivio Graziani’, in Il movimento di liberazione in Italia, 1973, no. 110, 16–17.
3.The six largest camps held approximately 78,000 people. The total number of individuals interned during this period was 90,761, not including those who died during the weeks long marches across the desert. The total number of deportees was over 100,000, more than half the total population of the region. Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, vol. 2: dal fascismo a Gheddafi (Roma: Laterza, 1986–88), 179–189.
4.Quoted in Eric Salerno, Genocidio in Libya: Le atrocità nascoste dell’avventura coloniale italiana, 1911–1931 (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2005), 96–97.
5.Ottolenghi, Gli italiani e il colonialismo. I campi di detenzione italiani in Africa (Milano: SugarCo, 1997), 144–148.
6.Based on 1923 and 1936 census data, Rochat estimates that a minimum of 30,000 died as a result of the Italian campaign in Cyrenaica. This figure does not, however, account for population increase during the 1920s, and, Rochat concludes, a more likely number is 40,000, while the number 70,000 proposed by another scholar could also be possible. See Rochat, ‘La repressione della resistenza in Cirenaica’, 82–83.
7.Ned Blackhawk , Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006), 5–6.
8.Benjamin Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 11, 19. See also Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011).
9.Patrick Wolfe , ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4 (December 2006), 387–409.
10.Edward Evans Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1949), 38.
&
nbsp; 11.On the Senussi , see Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Forgotten Voices: Power and Agency in Colonial and Postcolonial Libya (New York: Routledge, 2005), 25–26
12.See Alexander De Grand, The Italian Nationalist Association and the Rise of Fascism (Nebraska, 1978).
13.Nicola Labanca, Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiano (Bologna: Il mulino, 2002), 34–47
14.Labanca, Oltremare, 114–115.
15.Labanca, Oltremare, 119.
16.Benito Mussolini , ‘La Dottrina del Fascismo’ in Edoardo and Duilio Susmel (eds.), Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini (Florence: La Fenice, 1961), vol. 34, 131.
17.Enzo Santarelli, ‘The Ideology of the Libyan ‘Reconquest’ (1927–31)’, in Enzo Santarelli (ed.), Omar al-Mukhtar : The Italian Reconquest of Libya (London: Darf, 1986), 21–26.
18.Spain had also used poison gas in Morocco during the 1920s.
19.See Eileen Ryan, ‘Violence and the politics of prestige: the fascist turn in colonial Libya’, Modern Italy, 20:2 (April 2015), 123–135.
20.Giulano Bonacci, Il califfato, l’Islam e la Libia (Rome, 1913), 23–24. Quoted in Santarelli, 26.
21.Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia,18–20.
22.Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, 34.
23.Emilio Canevari, La guerra italiana. Retroscena della disfatta (Rome: Tosi, 1948), 302, n. 2.
24.Quoted in Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, 22.
25.De Bono was one of the four Fascists who organized the ‘March on Rome’, leading to Mussolini’s seizure of power, hence the title ‘Quadrumvir’.
26.Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, 94, 101.
27.Attilio Teruzzi, Cirenaica verde: due anni di governo, dicembre 1926–gennaio 1929 (Milan: Mondadori, 1931), 338–339.
28.For multiple accounts of such bombings, see Eric Salerno, Genocidio in Libya, 59–71.
29.Giorgio Rochat, ‘The Repression of Resistance in Cyrenaica (1927–1931)’, in Enzo Santarelli (ed.), Omar al-Mukhtar: The Italian Reconquest of Libya (London: Darf, 1986), 21–26,44–45.
30.Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, 105–106. See also Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, 177, 179.
31.Rochat, ‘Repression of Resistance’, 52.
32.Circular printed in Massimo Adolfo Vitale, L’Italia in Africa: Serie Storico-Militare, Volume Primo, L’opera dell’esercito: avventimenti militari e imipiego, Africa Settentrionale, 1911–1943 (Italia: Ministero Degli Affari Esteri, 1964) 199–201.
33.Del Boca, Gli italiani in libia, 159–160.
34.See De Bono to Badoglio, 25 November 1929, in ASMAI, Libia, pos. 150/21, f. 90. tel 7647.
35.Del Boca, Gli italiani in libia, 165.
36. Rodolfo Graziani , ‘L’autobiografia di un soldato d’Africa’, Oltremare 4:4 (April 1930), 166.
37.Badoglio to De Bono (Minister of Colonies), July 1, 1930, in ACS, Scattola 11, Fascicolo 14, Sottofascicolo 7.
38.Quoed in Rochat, ‘Repression of Resistance’, 73.
39.Ahmida, Forgotten Voices, 25–26.
40.Rochat, ‘Repression of Resistance’, 83.
41.Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, 179.
42.Clemente Menzio, ‘Dieci anni di storia cirenaica’, in ACS FG, Busta 9.
43.Del Boca, Gli italiani in libia, 180.
44.Graziani, Cirenaica pacificata, 104–105.
45.See Claudio Segré, Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization of Libya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
46.Quoted in Segre, Fourth Shore, 65. (emphasis in Federzoni’s original text).
47.Omar Bartov links political utopias to the annihilation of others in Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide , and Modern Identity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4–5.
48. Rodolfo Graziani , ‘Mia conclusioni’, 4, in ACS, Archivio Graziani, Fasc. 13, Sotto.Fasc. 1: ‘Atti Varie Cirineica’.
49.See Graziani, ‘Le popolazioni’, in ACS, Archivio Graziani, Scattola 9, Fasc. 13, Sottofascicolo 5.
50.See Graziani to Governor of Libya and Ministry of Colonies, ‘Situazione general della Colonia alla data odierna’, April 1934, in ACS, Archivio Graziani, Scattola 11, Fascicolo 14, Sottofascicolo 9: ‘Relazione finale’.
51.Graziani, Cirenaica pacificata, 122–123.
52.On various methods by which Italian authorities registered land in the public domain (expropriation, sales, forced sales, and ‘robbery’), see Segre, Fourth Shore, 47–54, 62–76.
53. Wolfe , ‘Settler colonialism’, 396.
54.For explanations of these typologies and general discussion of Italy’s concentration camps in its African colonies, see Gustavo Ottolenghi, Gli italiani e il colonialismo. I campi di detenzione italiani in Africa (Milano: SugarCo, 1997), 144–148.
55.Del Boca, Gli italiani in libia, 189.
56.Rochat, ‘La repressione della resistenza in Cirenaica’, 96–97.
57.Clemente Menzio, ‘Dieci anni di storia cirenaica’, in ACS FG, Busta 9.
58.See Salerno, Ottolenghi, among others.
59.ACS, FG, Busta 9, Fascicolo 13, sottofascicolo 3, Commissario del Gebel-Barce, to Vicegovernatore (Graziani), June 27, 1932.
60.ACS, FG, Busta 9, Fascicolo 13, sottofascicolo 3, Commissario Regionale to Vicegovernatore, February 18, 1933.
61.ACS, FG, Busta 9, Fascicolo 13, sottofascicolo 3, Commissario del Gebel-Barce, to Vicegovernatore (Graziani), June 27, 1932.
62.Quoted in Del Boca, Gli italiani in libia, 189.
63.ACS, FG, Busta 9, Fascicolo 13, sottofascicolo 3, Commissario del Gebel-Barce, to Vicegovernatore (Graziani), June 27, 1932.
64.‘Dalla normalizzazione etnica alla ricostruzione economica della nostra Colonia’, La Cirenaica, September 30, 1933.
65. Wolfe , ‘Settler Colonialism’, 397.
66.For definitions of ‘genocide ’, see Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2010).
67.See Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘A Lesser Evil? Italian Fascism in/and the Totalitarian Equation’, in Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin (eds.), The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 137–153.
Part IV
Repression and Resistance
© The Author(s) 2018
Philip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck (eds.)Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern WorldCambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62923-0_11
Contesting Colonial Violence in New Caledonia
Adrian Muckle1
(1)Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Adrian Muckle
Email: [email protected]
This chapter is about the ways in which different forms of colonial violence were or were not contested on local and imperial scales in the French settler colony of New Caledonia. 1 Developing David Riches’ idea that a defining feature of violence is its ‘contested legitimacy ’, I identify and examine the arguments and agreements about violence and the justifications for it in three connected instances of violence drawn from the archive of a small war in New Caledonia. 2 The aim is to bring into focus the moments of contestation that can be identified and where possible explore what they reveal about the dynamics, structures and relationships that are part of the history of colonial violence in New Caledonia: the tensions between the administration and different categories of settlers; the relations between gendarmes and administrative chiefs; the role played by missionary critics; and the part that indigenous conceptions and practices of violence had in shaping settler reactions.
The violence in question has a particular context: an archipelago in island Melanesia settled by the ancestors of the indigenous Kanak people as early as 3200 BP and annexed by France in 1853, becoming a site for penal transportation from 1864 to 1897 and, especially from the 1890s onwards, a destination for a trickle of free settlers. In its 1911 census the colony counted about 50,000 inhabitants including: nearly 29,000 Kanak; about 11,000 free French settlers; some 5600 convicts and freed
convicts; and about 4000 immigrant labourers from Indochina, Java, Japan and other parts of Oceania. 3 Beginning in the 1870s Kanak were forced into reservations (known misleadingly as tribes/tribus) which constituted not much more than 10 per cent of all land by the early 1900s. While this loss of land provided the basic structural violence of colonisation, further layers were added by the efforts to mobilise Kanak and indentured labour for the colony’s mines and plantations and by the administrative regime known as l’indigénat introduced in 1887 which allowed administrators to fine, imprison and intern colonial subjects without recourse to the justice system for offences deemed ‘special’ to indigenes and designed to enforce labour requisitions and tax collection.