The World Aflame by Dan Jones

Author:Dan Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789542028
Publisher: Head of Zeus

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Italian Libya

The absence of decisive global leadership in the 1930s allowed Benito Mussolini’s Italian Army to pursue a long-standing colonial project in North Africa. Twenty years previously, Italy had fought a war with the Ottoman Empire to capture the province of Tripolitania (roughly, modern Libya), which they divided into two territories: Italian Tripolitania and Italian Cyrenaica.

As a young man, Mussolini had opposed war in Libya. But by 1930, he was a dictator with dreams of a ‘Second Roman Empire’ and had updated his opinions accordingly. He authorized General Rodolfo Graziani to move into North Africa to put down a stubborn anti-Italian rebellion directed by Sheikh Omar al-Mukhtar, a leader of the Senussi movement, nicknamed the ‘Lion of the Desert’.

Graziani carried out his orders with extreme prejudice. He incarcerated Cyrenaica’s population in concentration camps, mounted air attacks, and constructed a fortified fence to cut off the rebels from Egypt. At least 40 per cent of Cyrenaica’s population died, including the seventy-three-year-old Omar, who was captured in September 1931 and hanged.

By 1932 the so-called Pacification of Libya was complete. Cyrenaica and Tripolitania were combined to form Italian Libya, and Italians were encouraged to settle there. Libyans were inducted into the Fascist Party and the Italian Army. Whether the Libyan boy shown here raising his arm in a Fascist salute was mimicking his elders in jest or seriousness is not clear. Whatever the case, it was plain that by the early 1930s, fascism was on the march.

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