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Italy’s unholy war

Ian Campbell - The Tablet - Wed, Mar 16th 2022

Italy’s unholy war

The monastery of Debre Libanos - Photo: Alamy/Zoonar GmbH

A veil of silence was historically drawn over atrocities committed by Italian soldiers in Ethiopia. Now, finally, the collective amnesia is lifting – revealing the complicity of the Catholic hierarchy in Mussolini’s deadly campaign

Hidden away inside one of highland Ethiopia’s greatest canyons, remote, silent and seemingly ­inviolate, the thirteenth-century Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church monastery of Debre Libanos beckons the faithful who want to renounce the world. Three decades ago, it beckoned me and my co-researcher, Degife Gebre-Tsadiq of the University of Addis Ababa. When we sat to take a breather at the side of the winding trail leading down to the monastery, the towering cliff frowning above us, scattered groups of pilgrims passed by. Priests with their hand crosses for the faithful to kiss, white-clad nuns, monks with ancient parchment prayer books and the occasional solitary hermit with his gaunt, iron cross, evoked a scene from The Canterbury Tales.

Later, seated on age-worn benches in the house of the Council of Elders, the smiling, bearded abbot began to talk about the monastery. It was then that we learned that despite the appearance of a lost paradise, Debre Libanos has a tragic history. Far from being inviolate, the monastery and its lands had been ravaged several times over the centuries, and none of its original buildings survived; but in May 1937 the entire monastic community was murdered in a massacre of unprecedented ferocity and cruelty. The assailants this time were Italian soldiers. Their death had been ordered by the viceroy of Italian East Africa, and the troops were under the command of General Pietro Maletti, a name that still lives in infamy for the elders of Debre Libanos.
Brutally massacred? By Italians? I knew that Ethiopia has been the world’s first sovereign state to fall victim to Fascist invaders. However, I had thought that, unlike the Nazis, Italian soldiers of the 1930s were bumbling, harmless young men who had been drafted against their will. Atrocities were not something I associated with Italians. I was intrigued by the lack of information about an atrocity of such magnitude. So Gebre-Tsadiq and I dedicated ourselves to discovering what exactly had happened, and why.

Mussolini had launched the invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 to achieve a glittering victory that would strengthen his popularity, and link the Italian colonies of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. Contemporary Fascist sources show that this was to be the first phase of an expansionist drive that Il Duce hoped would ultimately provide Italy with hegemony over the entire Mediterranean Sea. To serve this purpose, the nation-state of Ethiopia would be annexed, dismantled and turned into a vast industrial-military complex. However, despite facing machine guns, tanks and aerial bombardment with toxic gases, the Ethiopians put up stiff resist­ance throughout the invasion and occupation, and the Italians never managed to gain control of more than a fraction of the country. 

Mussolini’s chief commander in occupied Ethiopia, Rodolfo Graziani, ordered the ­liquidation of the monastery as a decisive blow against the Orthodox Church, which he viewed as the heart and soul of resistance to the occupation. Badly injured during an attack on the high command carried out in early 1937 by disaffected Eritrean employees of his administration in the capital Addis Ababa, he decided that the community of Debre Libanos should take the blame. And his loyal friend Maletti would be the executioner. Graziani’s missives to Mussolini reported that his troops had executed around 400 clergy at Debre Libanos. However, after several years of studying dusty archives and tracking down eyewitnesses, it emerged that the slaughter had actually been on a much greater scale. In fact around 2,000 defenceless monks, deacons and pilgrims had met a cruel death at the hands of a Muslim battalion created for that very purpose by Graziani, under the command of Maletti. And to ensure the maximum number of victims, the massacre – which took place over several days – had been deliberately scheduled to begin on the day of the annual celebration of the monastery’s founding saint. 
The scale of the atrocity was breathtaking – the premier monastery of the largest Oriental Orthodox Church looted and destroyed, and all its monks and hundreds of priests, deacons, novices, students and pilgrims murdered, including the Church’s most renowned and revered scholars. History yields few equivalent horrors; in Britain we would have to look back to the eighth-century Viking massacre at Lindisfarne.

Sadly, although Gebre-Tsadiq would pass away before our research was complete, the distinguished Ethiopianist Richard Pankhurst joined hands with me in the project. His ­suffragette and anti-Fascist mother Sylvia (the daughter of Emmeline) had led an international lobby against the Italian invasion and had first brought the slaughter at Debre Libanos to international attention in June 1937, and he had himself conducted pioneering research into the occupation.

As our research progressed, involving interviews with ageing Ethiopian clerics and villagers who provided blow-by-blow accounts of the horrors they had witnessed, it became clear that the invasion and subsequent occupation was a grisly early example of “total war”, in which large-scale war was deliberately waged against civilians as well as the military – a precursor of what occupied Europe would suffer in the years that followed.

Indeed, it transpired that the Italian campaign against the Ethiopian Orthodox Church went much further than historians had realised. Debre Libanos was the tip of the iceberg. The Italians had systematically attacked hundreds of churches and monasteries, but with scarcely a mention in their military reports.

To my horror, it emerged that in town after town, village after village, rampaging soldiers had pillaged the sacred sites, killed the clergy and turned the churches into funeral pyres. They had even created and armed a 3,000-strong irregular Muslim company specifically to declare a jihad in the Christian highlands, during which untold numbers of churches were burned, and clergy, women and children maimed and slaughtered.

What could have inspired the Italians to commit such excesses, and with such impunity? The Italian hierarchy promoted and sanctified the invasion, granting it the status of a crusade – a holy war against what they termed the “heretics and schismatics” of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Encouraged by the cheerleading clerics, and following the lead of Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster of Milan, who enthusiastically proclaimed the invasion “an assignment from God”, thousands of volunteers had flocked to join the Blackshirts in what became known as the Great Mobilisation.

On 28 October 1935, as he was celebrating Mass in his cathedral, Schuster prayed to God to safeguard the Italian troops as they “open the door of Ethiopia to the Catholic faith and Roman civilisation”, before blessing their banners. Aware that his Catholic missions in Ethiopia enjoyed a positive and constructive relationship with the government of Emperor Haile Selassie, Pope Pius XI had initially expressed doubts about the wisdom and morality of the invasion. However, once it was clear that Il Duce was determined to go ahead, he stood by in silence, and within a few months of the launch of the invasion he was putting his weight behind Mussolini’s fight against the League of Nations’ anti-war sanctions.

Why did this slaughter almost escape attention in historical memory? Although for much of the occupation Pius XI had an apostolic delegate on the ground in Ethiopia, the Holy See maintained silence on the suffering of the Ethiopian Orthodox clergy and the destruction of that nation’s venerable Christian institutions – some dating back to the fourth century, when the kingdom of Aksum in ­present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea declared Christianity as the state religion.

After Ethiopia regained its independence from Italy in 1941, realpolitik blocked any reckoning with the past. Emperor Haile Selassie had to operate under the auspices of the British government which, following a policy of appeasement towards Mussolini, obstructed the emperor’s attempts to document Italian war crimes. Following Italy’s surrender in 1943, the British and American governments were unwilling to accuse their new ally of atrocities in occupied nations such as Ethiopia and Yugoslavia, and when the Second World War ended the British ­government, keen to have a right-wing ­administration in Rome as a bulwark against the rising tide of communism, ensured ­protection of Italian commanders from the ignominy of UN war crimes trials.

Thus in Italy a veil of silence and collective amnesia descended regarding the atrocities in Ethiopia, facilitating the myth of a “benign Fascism” that emerged in the 1950s and gained traction in the 1960s. This narrative was encouraged by Pope Pius XII, who as Pius XI’s secretary of state during the 1930s had tacitly supported the invasion and, when Haile Selassie had desperately requested Vatican intervention, had sought to deny the atrocities. The Great Forgetting, maintained principally by Mussolini’s former supporters in Italy’s post-war institutions, held fast until intrepid scholars such as Angelo Del Boca and Richard Pankhurst started exposing the facts in the 1970s and 1980s. Until the 1990s, their ­readership was limited principally to fellow academics. But now an internet-driven critical mass is emerging in Italy of people willing to seek the truth about the pogroms of their forebears in Ethiopia. Neither Gebre-Tsadiq nor Pankhurst lived to see it, but 30 years after my first descent to a remote monastery in the Ethiopian highlands the old narrative is finally unravelling.

Intrigued and inspired by my 2014 book, The Massacre of Debre Libanos, the dynamic Antonello Carvigiani of the Italian Catholic Church television channel TV2000 took a film crew to Ethiopia to see for himself. With the blessing of Pope Francis, his documentary film Debre Libanos: Il più grande massacro di cristiani was shown in the Vatican to an invited audience in December 2016. I witnessed for the first time the Italian atrocities being openly discussed by senior officials of the Holy See, together with Catholic and Orthodox Ethiopians. A few weeks later, Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Sant’Egidio Community, appealed in Corriere della Sera for “concrete gestures” by the Italian authorities to apologise for the massacres of Ethiopian clergy. Pointing out the “collusion of the Catholic Church” in the invasion of Ethiopia, Riccardi called attention to the recent papal visit to the Basilica of St Bartholomew, where Francis had prayed before an icon depicting, inter alia, the victims of the massacre of Debre Libanos, and in a newspaper interview he expressed dismay that “no Italian personality had felt the need even to bring a wreath to Debre Libanos”.

Meanwhile gruesome photographs that had been taken by a lieutenant in the 45th Muslim battalion in charge of carrying out the shootings appeared in the Italian media. They showed the monks and priests of Debre Libanos about to be transported to their death, and the bodies of monks laid out on the ground after they had been shot with some Italian officers standing over them. The photos went viral, and local authorities were horrified to discover that the military commanders they had been immortalising as heroes had been responsible for these outrages. At one emotional meeting, the city council of the Lombardy city of Cocquio-Trevisago broke new ground. It was decided to remove the street sign “Via Pietro Maletti” and change it to “Via Martiri Cristiani” – the Street of the Christian Martyrs – in memory of the victims of Debre Libanos.

Ian Campbell has written several books on the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. Holy War: The Untold Story of Catholic Italy’s Crusade Against the Ethiopian Orthodox Church was published in November 2021 (Hurst, £30; Tablet price £27).

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