Emanuele Ertola
Jacobin
https://jacobin.com/2024/02/addis-abada-ethiopia-italian-massacre
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| Um veterano de guerra etíope caminha para um serviço memorial em comemoração ao massacre de Adis Abeba, 19 de fevereiro de 2018. (Yonas Tadesse/AFP via Getty Images) |
Nem sequer um ano depois da sangrenta ocupação da Etiópia, que Benito Mussolini alardeava como a "conquista de um império italiano", os invasores ainda eram poucos e não dormiam facilmente. Os soldados e os fascistas, juntamente com as “tropas nativas” alistadas na colônia, nunca pararam de lutar; durante meses cruzaram o vasto interior à caça da ainda armada resistência etíope. Os outros italianos, fossem civis ou camisas negras, estavam majoritariamente escondidos nas cidades - e ouviam com apreensão relatos de perigosos "bandos rebeldes" que se aproximavam.
Ainda assim, a repressão da resistência - eufemisticamente denominada "grande operação policial colonial", mas na verdade responsável por uma litania de assassinatos, aldeias queimadas e colheitas destruídas - parecia ter dado frutos. Na verdade, muitas formações de resistência foram desarmadas, os seus líderes e membros eliminados ou deportados para o terrível campo de internamento de Danane, na Somália também ocupada pelos italianos. Em suma, o nascente império fascista parecia estar a caminho de uma normalização lenta quando os ocupantes tiveram um rude despertar.
Em 19 de fevereiro de 1937 — Yekatit 12 segundo o calendário etíope — Rodolfo Graziani, vice-rei da Etiópia e governador-geral da África Oriental Italiana, estava em um palco na capital Adis Abeba, no meio de uma cerimônia oficial, quando dois patriotas de origem eritreia, Mogus Asghedom e Abraham Debotch lançaram várias granadas de mão em sua direção. A ação deles matou sete pessoas e feriu muitas outras. Entre os feridos estava o próprio Graziani, que foi rapidamente levado embora. Do lado italiano, o bombardeamento produziu pânico, um vácuo de poder, confusão na cadeia de comando e um desejo de vingança exemplar misturado com a necessidade de reafirmar plenamente a autoridade italiana o mais rapidamente possível. O resultado foi um massacre - uma atrocidade ainda difícil de descrever.
French diplomat Albert Bodard called it a pogrom, reporting that
Esquecendo os horrores
Who remembers those horrors? Ethiopia surely did. After World War II, it sought the extradition of Italian war criminals, later limiting itself to requests to try Graziani and Marshal Pietro Badoglio. But in the mounting Cold War climate, the Allies — most importantly, Great Britain and the United States — preferred to support the Italians’ line of having the right to try their own war criminals themselves, at home. This in fact never came to pass except in rare cases. Graziani was held to account for his role in the Nazi-collaborationist Italian Social Republic but not for his crimes in Ethiopia and before that in Libya. Ethiopia made one last, unsuccessful attempt in 1949, and then gave up, but did not forget. In 1955, Haile Selassie commissioned Croatian sculptor Antun Augustinčić to create the Monument to the Victims of Fascism. This monument survived the monarchy, the military dictatorship, and still towers over Sidist Kilo Square in remembrance of what happened in Yekatit 12.
Here in Italy, however, no one remembers February 19 anymore. What happened has prompted neither monuments nor mention in textbooks. As is well known, the lack of any Italian version of the Nuremberg trials had a powerful effect in entrenching the image of the “good Italian” in contrast to the Nazis. Moreover, in the postwar period, democratic and anti-fascist Italy sought to accredit itself as the bearer of legitimate interests in its former colonies (Ethiopia, the empire conquered by Fascism, excluded) by presenting its colonial past in a positive light. This relied on a version of events that eliminated all violence and discrimination, thus leaving only the work done by poor emigrants who, through sheer tenacity alone, built infrastructure and fertilized land that would otherwise have been left to the desert. This narrative survived even when, at the turn of the 1940s to the 1950s, the possibility of any Italian institutional involvement in the former colonies faded, except for the trusteeship of Somalia. Fueled by years of publications and talking points that found agreement across the parliamentary spectrum, the idea of the “good colonizer” established itself in Italian culture and the national imagination, from journalistic reconstructions to school textbooks, making it a pillar of republican national identity.
The events of February 19, or of Debre Libanos, went almost unmentioned — except for a few faint traces — until the late 1990s, when new studies, following in the footsteps of pioneering scholars such as Angelo Del Boca, Enzo Collotti, and Giorgio Rochat, brought to light certain dark sides of Italian history. This did not, however, have much effect on the collective consciousness or spark any real public debate. The reluctance to come to grips with this past has proven enduring. This is demonstrated by the weak echo of books such as the diary of journalist Ciro Poggiali, published in 1971 but never reprinted, and the memoirs of Hungarian doctor Sáska László, also an eyewitness to the massacre, published in English in 2015 but never translated into Italian. There is likewise no Italian translation of The Plot to Kill Graziani, the first volume with which, in 2010, Ian Campbell reconstructed the 1937 assassination attempt. It is perhaps a sign of some attention being stirred that Campbell’s next volume, The Addis Ababa Massacre, from 2017, was (finally) translated into Italian the following year, but did not give much of a jolt to the country’s anesthetized consciousness of its own past.
The events of February 19 and those that followed continue to be ignored by mainstream culture, neglected by school curriculums, and indeed essentially unknown to most Italians. This absence — of memory, of awareness, of debate — is reflected in urban landscapes throughout Italy, which are still pervaded with monuments, statues, streets, and squares celebrating colonial expansion, its battles, and its protagonists. In most cases, this exists without any public intervention to alter this picture, and without even a line explaining to the passerby that no, the street where he lives and works is not called Amba Aradam in reference to an Ethiopian mountain massif but in memory of a bloody battle. In his book Tainted Landscapes, Martin Pollack wonders if, when visiting a place, we should not always ask whether it has something to hide from us. Is it really as innocent and as idyllic as it seems? What do we find if we start digging? In Rome, we would find many such places. Strange, exotic names that are sometimes hard to pronounce, about which most Romans probably don’t ask questions even though they should be interrogated. Such names pose at least two questions. First, what do they represent? They are not just geographical places, dots on the map; each is connected to a historical event, and each event tells us a story. If we read all these colonial place names one after the other, we read the history of Italy and of its expansion into Africa. The second, equally important, question is, who decided that they should be there? Who decided that those places and events should be solemnly remembered by a street name, enduring in imperishable memory?
And yet the times they are a-changin’. We are reminded of this by the European Parliament, which in 2019 passed a resolution on the fundamental rights of populations of African descent. The document imputes the causes of racial discrimination to the failure to recognize phenomena such as “enslavement, forced labor, racial apartheid, massacres and genocides under European colonialism.” This is reiterated in the EU Anti-racism Action Plan 2020–2025, which states that “prejudices and stereotypes can first be addressed by recognizing the historical roots of racism. Colonialism, slavery, and the Holocaust are part of our history and have profound consequences for society today. Preserving memory is critical to encouraging inclusion and understanding.” And in the wake of grassroots movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and then Black Lives Matter, some countries such as France and Belgium have begun an intense public debate on the colonial legacy and the responsibilities attached to colonialism.
But what about Italy? Here, too, something has begun to shift. On October 6, 2022, Rome’s city council approved Motion 156/2022, which, among other things, calls on city hall to begin a process of re-signifying colonial place names. This move was followed by the councils of other cities, including Bologna and Turin. To call a location Via or Piazza Addis Abeba does not evoke just another city but the place where one of the worst massacres in Italian history began on February 19. It is a tainted place, and as such must be treated with caution, warning those who pass in front of it, defusing its charge of violence, and decolonizing it. The best way to make these places harmless, the first necessary step, is to educate people to be aware of what these names and sites represent.
Ainda assim, a repressão da resistência - eufemisticamente denominada "grande operação policial colonial", mas na verdade responsável por uma litania de assassinatos, aldeias queimadas e colheitas destruídas - parecia ter dado frutos. Na verdade, muitas formações de resistência foram desarmadas, os seus líderes e membros eliminados ou deportados para o terrível campo de internamento de Danane, na Somália também ocupada pelos italianos. Em suma, o nascente império fascista parecia estar a caminho de uma normalização lenta quando os ocupantes tiveram um rude despertar.
Em 19 de fevereiro de 1937 — Yekatit 12 segundo o calendário etíope — Rodolfo Graziani, vice-rei da Etiópia e governador-geral da África Oriental Italiana, estava em um palco na capital Adis Abeba, no meio de uma cerimônia oficial, quando dois patriotas de origem eritreia, Mogus Asghedom e Abraham Debotch lançaram várias granadas de mão em sua direção. A ação deles matou sete pessoas e feriu muitas outras. Entre os feridos estava o próprio Graziani, que foi rapidamente levado embora. Do lado italiano, o bombardeamento produziu pânico, um vácuo de poder, confusão na cadeia de comando e um desejo de vingança exemplar misturado com a necessidade de reafirmar plenamente a autoridade italiana o mais rapidamente possível. O resultado foi um massacre - uma atrocidade ainda difícil de descrever.
Brutalidade com poucas comparações
Nos momentos imediatamente após a ação de resistência, as tropas italianas começaram a disparar indiscriminadamente contra a multidão. Fora da cidade, as tropas das guarnições receberam ordens para começar a marchar em direção a Adis Abeba, atirando em qualquer pessoa que encontrassem e incendiando casas etíopes. Em carta enviada em 30 de abril de 1937, um Camisa Negra falou sobre como era essa marcha:
Estupefatos, também saímos de nossa fortificação, com equipamento de guerra completo, apoiados por tanques e motocicletas com metralhadoras: percorremos dezenas de quilômetros, atirando em qualquer indivíduo de cor que encontrássemos, e massacrando, em suas próprias cabanas, todos os nativos que encontramos em nosso caminho.
Chegados aos arredores da cidade, em frente aos aglomerados de tuculs - pequenas habitações - onde os etíopes tinham se fechado,
como não podíamos atingir todos com fuzis, nossos oficiais mandaram acionar os lança-chamas: assim, em dez minutos incendiamos, como fogueiras, centenas e centenas de tuculs, nos quais havia mulheres, idosos e crianças, que ficaram torrado.
Entretanto, na cidade, a mais alta autoridade política remanescente, o secretário federal do Partido Nacional Fascista, Guido Cortese, ordenou represálias - libertando literalmente a população italiana da coleira. Durante três dias, trabalhadores, caminhoneiros, civis e camisas negras - que receberam carta branca do Partido Fascista - transformaram a cidade num círculo do inferno, numa orgia de brutalidade que tem poucas comparações, mesmo na história do colonialismo europeu.
Diplomatas estrangeiros fornecem um testemunho vívido disso nas cartas atordoadas que enviaram às suas respectivas capitais. No primeiro dia do massacre, o representante dos EUA Cornelius Engert telegrafou para Washington:
Os nativos foram espancados e metralhados indiscriminadamente e as cabanas dos nativos foram queimadas. Bombas incendiárias foram lançadas por aviões que operam nos arredores da cidade, e atualmente é audível por toda a cidade uma grande quantidade de tiros de rifle e até mesmo tiros de armas de campanha. As ruas foram esvaziadas de nativos e todos os italianos, incluindo os trabalhadores civis, andam fortemente armados e parecem estar completamente alarmados.
The next day, he added, “Since the incident, disorderly bands of laborers and blackshirts armed with axes, clubs, or rifles have been roaming the streets and, in circumstances of revolting savagery, have been killing all natives in sight, even women.”
French diplomat Albert Bodard called it a pogrom, reporting that
there are so many corpses that no decent burials can be performed; bodies are piled up, doused with petrol and incinerated on the spot. Whole districts of Abyssinian tuculs have been set ablaze with flame throwers and hand grenades. In many cases, the native occupants, who were unable to flee, were burned alive in their homes. Every night, the town is surrounded by infernos. . . . Great confusion reigns in the city, where Blackshirts, troops and armed workers seem to be left free to act as they please.
And further:
Truck drivers also chased Abyssinians with their cars, or hurled them viciously at the natives in order to crush them. When the victims were slow in dying, truncheons opened up their skulls and brought the recalcitrant back to reason.
British witnesses offered a similar account:
For two and a half days the Ethiopians wherever found and however occupied were hunted down, beaten, shot, bayonetted or clubbed to death. Their houses were burnt and in some cases they themselves were pushed back into the flames to die by burning. With this slaughter were combined loot and pillage. The following incidents which are reported on good authority are illustrative of the conduct of the Italians. A band of eight blackshirts were seen beating with staves, apparently to death, an Ethiopian whose hands had first been tied behind his back. . . . An Italian colonel stopped his car in a main street to trash a group of three Ethiopians, one man and two women. After beating the man he started on the woman, but noticing the car of a foreign Legation nearby he desisted. ... Perhaps one of the principle motives behind the action of the Italians was that of fear, for at no time since their occupation have they felt secure.
After three days, when the order finally came to halt the violence, the death toll was appalling: about three thousand dead were reported, but more recent calculations by Ian Campbell estimate a number six times that, perhaps close to twenty thousand people. This was just the beginning of an appalling reprisal over subsequent months that bloodied Ethiopia with gruesome episodes like the summary execution of two thousand monks and deacons at Debre Libanos monastery. But what happened between February 19 and 21 remains especially significant — not only because of its sheer dimensions or its brutality but because the protagonists were Italians, mostly civilians, who did not follow orders or respond to military logic but were simply given a free hand. In a later report, the British consulate commented that, in retrospect, “Addis Ababa was the scene of such horrors as can rarely if ever have been committed by the representatives of any modern civilised nation.”
Esquecendo os horrores
Who remembers those horrors? Ethiopia surely did. After World War II, it sought the extradition of Italian war criminals, later limiting itself to requests to try Graziani and Marshal Pietro Badoglio. But in the mounting Cold War climate, the Allies — most importantly, Great Britain and the United States — preferred to support the Italians’ line of having the right to try their own war criminals themselves, at home. This in fact never came to pass except in rare cases. Graziani was held to account for his role in the Nazi-collaborationist Italian Social Republic but not for his crimes in Ethiopia and before that in Libya. Ethiopia made one last, unsuccessful attempt in 1949, and then gave up, but did not forget. In 1955, Haile Selassie commissioned Croatian sculptor Antun Augustinčić to create the Monument to the Victims of Fascism. This monument survived the monarchy, the military dictatorship, and still towers over Sidist Kilo Square in remembrance of what happened in Yekatit 12.
Here in Italy, however, no one remembers February 19 anymore. What happened has prompted neither monuments nor mention in textbooks. As is well known, the lack of any Italian version of the Nuremberg trials had a powerful effect in entrenching the image of the “good Italian” in contrast to the Nazis. Moreover, in the postwar period, democratic and anti-fascist Italy sought to accredit itself as the bearer of legitimate interests in its former colonies (Ethiopia, the empire conquered by Fascism, excluded) by presenting its colonial past in a positive light. This relied on a version of events that eliminated all violence and discrimination, thus leaving only the work done by poor emigrants who, through sheer tenacity alone, built infrastructure and fertilized land that would otherwise have been left to the desert. This narrative survived even when, at the turn of the 1940s to the 1950s, the possibility of any Italian institutional involvement in the former colonies faded, except for the trusteeship of Somalia. Fueled by years of publications and talking points that found agreement across the parliamentary spectrum, the idea of the “good colonizer” established itself in Italian culture and the national imagination, from journalistic reconstructions to school textbooks, making it a pillar of republican national identity.
The events of February 19, or of Debre Libanos, went almost unmentioned — except for a few faint traces — until the late 1990s, when new studies, following in the footsteps of pioneering scholars such as Angelo Del Boca, Enzo Collotti, and Giorgio Rochat, brought to light certain dark sides of Italian history. This did not, however, have much effect on the collective consciousness or spark any real public debate. The reluctance to come to grips with this past has proven enduring. This is demonstrated by the weak echo of books such as the diary of journalist Ciro Poggiali, published in 1971 but never reprinted, and the memoirs of Hungarian doctor Sáska László, also an eyewitness to the massacre, published in English in 2015 but never translated into Italian. There is likewise no Italian translation of The Plot to Kill Graziani, the first volume with which, in 2010, Ian Campbell reconstructed the 1937 assassination attempt. It is perhaps a sign of some attention being stirred that Campbell’s next volume, The Addis Ababa Massacre, from 2017, was (finally) translated into Italian the following year, but did not give much of a jolt to the country’s anesthetized consciousness of its own past.
The events of February 19 and those that followed continue to be ignored by mainstream culture, neglected by school curriculums, and indeed essentially unknown to most Italians. This absence — of memory, of awareness, of debate — is reflected in urban landscapes throughout Italy, which are still pervaded with monuments, statues, streets, and squares celebrating colonial expansion, its battles, and its protagonists. In most cases, this exists without any public intervention to alter this picture, and without even a line explaining to the passerby that no, the street where he lives and works is not called Amba Aradam in reference to an Ethiopian mountain massif but in memory of a bloody battle. In his book Tainted Landscapes, Martin Pollack wonders if, when visiting a place, we should not always ask whether it has something to hide from us. Is it really as innocent and as idyllic as it seems? What do we find if we start digging? In Rome, we would find many such places. Strange, exotic names that are sometimes hard to pronounce, about which most Romans probably don’t ask questions even though they should be interrogated. Such names pose at least two questions. First, what do they represent? They are not just geographical places, dots on the map; each is connected to a historical event, and each event tells us a story. If we read all these colonial place names one after the other, we read the history of Italy and of its expansion into Africa. The second, equally important, question is, who decided that they should be there? Who decided that those places and events should be solemnly remembered by a street name, enduring in imperishable memory?
And yet the times they are a-changin’. We are reminded of this by the European Parliament, which in 2019 passed a resolution on the fundamental rights of populations of African descent. The document imputes the causes of racial discrimination to the failure to recognize phenomena such as “enslavement, forced labor, racial apartheid, massacres and genocides under European colonialism.” This is reiterated in the EU Anti-racism Action Plan 2020–2025, which states that “prejudices and stereotypes can first be addressed by recognizing the historical roots of racism. Colonialism, slavery, and the Holocaust are part of our history and have profound consequences for society today. Preserving memory is critical to encouraging inclusion and understanding.” And in the wake of grassroots movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and then Black Lives Matter, some countries such as France and Belgium have begun an intense public debate on the colonial legacy and the responsibilities attached to colonialism.
But what about Italy? Here, too, something has begun to shift. On October 6, 2022, Rome’s city council approved Motion 156/2022, which, among other things, calls on city hall to begin a process of re-signifying colonial place names. This move was followed by the councils of other cities, including Bologna and Turin. To call a location Via or Piazza Addis Abeba does not evoke just another city but the place where one of the worst massacres in Italian history began on February 19. It is a tainted place, and as such must be treated with caution, warning those who pass in front of it, defusing its charge of violence, and decolonizing it. The best way to make these places harmless, the first necessary step, is to educate people to be aware of what these names and sites represent.
Esta foi a razão para fundar a Rede Yekatit de 12 a 19 de fevereiro. Reúne informalmente a galáxia de institutos, associações e indivíduos de toda a Itália que têm lidado com esta questão ao longo dos anos. Para promover a implementação da Moção 156, em fevereiro de 2023 a rede organizou uma semana de eventos em Roma sobre o colonialismo italiano e os seus legados. Este ano está de volta — e maior, com um calendário completo de eventos que abrange os próximos quatro meses, não apenas em Roma, mas também em muitas outras cidades, incluindo Bari, Bolonha, Florença, Milão, Modena, Nápoles e Pádua. Conferências, debates, performances, passeios históricos e concertos visam difundir o conhecimento e estimular a reflexão crítica sobre o colonialismo no passado e no presente da Itália, os crimes cometidos e o peso desta história na formação da identidade nacional. Em parte através deste esforço, talvez, os italianos começarão a recordar o 19 de fevereiro, o passado de que fala e o presente que ajudou a construir.
Colaboradores
Emanuele Ertola é pesquisador da Universidade de Siena, onde leciona história contemporânea. Suas publicações incluem In terra d'Africa. Gli italiani che colonizzarono l'impero (Laterza, 2017) e Il colonialismo degli italiani. História de uma ideologia (Carocci, 2022).
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