Italian Libya

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Colony coat of arms

Italian Libya ( Italian Libia Italiana ) was a colony of fascist Italy in what is now Libya , which existed from 1934 to 1943 . The colony was created after the end of the Second Italo-Libyan War through the amalgamation of the previously independent Italian colonies Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and the southern region of Fessan . As a result of the Italian race laws of 1938, which also extended to Libya, and the second colonial race law of 1939 , the country was administered as an apartheid regime - similar to the American southern states or later South Africa .

prehistory

Territorial development of Libya under Italian colonial rule (1912–1943)

The resistance of the local Senussi brotherhoods against Italian colonialism , which had existed since 1912, gained new impetus during the First World War . With Ottoman help, the Senussi conquered almost all of Libyan territory between 1915 and 1919; the Italians were only able to assert themselves in five coastal cities. After the end of the war, the Italians began to conquer the country again, between 1922 and 1925 they brought Tripolitania under their control, from 1926 to 1928 the Cyrenaica, from 1929/30 the Fezzan. The Libyan resistance could not be broken until 1931, after the Italian troops took the Kufra oases .

The Italians continued to crack down on the native Arabs with brutality. The influx of Italians to the north of Libya was encouraged, and over 100,000 Italian colonists settled in the country. The transport infrastructure was increasingly expanded and the Grand Prix races had already been held in Libya since 1933.

Great Britain left the Sarra Triangle to Italy in 1934 . Mussolini and Pierre Laval (then foreign ministers in the Flandin I cabinet ) agreed the Franco-Italian Agreement on January 7, 1935, and in it a definitive demarcation between Libya and the French colony of French Equatorial Africa . The treaty was never ratified by the Italian parliament; nevertheless Italy occupied the Aouzou Strip in 1935 as agreed .

Establishment

Visit of the Italian King Viktor Emanuel III. in Benghazi 1938

In 1934, the Italian Prime Minister and dictator Benito Mussolini declared Libya a colony. The three parts of the country, Tripolitania , Cyrenaica and Fezzan , which had been occupied by the Kingdom of Italy (intermittently) since the Turkish-Italian War of 1911/1912 , were united on January 1, 1935.

Italo Balbo was from then on Governor General of Libya (until 1940).

Racism and apartheid system

As early as the 1920s, the fascist regime pursued a policy aimed at gradually restricting those freedoms which the Libyan people had been granted under the liberal government. Fascism's striving for subordination and hierarchization was evident not only in the brutal suppression of uprisings, but also in the fact that Libyan full citizenship, as it had existed with certain basic rights, its own administration and its own parliament since the beginning of Italian rule, has been gradually dismantled since 1927. Until 1934 there was still a separate citizenship for the northern provinces - even if the previous rights were not comparable, but the previous right to exercise freely in Italy and the legal equality of Italians and Libyans in the colony itself were also suspended freedom of the press and expression.

Members of the Libyan Fascist Youth Association GAL

After the end of the Second Italo-Libyan War, the Libyans had a privileged position compared to the East African colonies, which the fascist regime had established with a different level of civilization. The Libyan Gourvneur Italo Balbo founded his own paramilitary youth organization GAL in 1935, which was similar to the fascist GIL in Italy. Both organizations remained separate, however, in order to do justice to "racial differentiation". Proposals for the establishment of comparable organizations in the East African colonies were rejected by the fascist leadership. On the “mixed race question” the fascist regime even temporarily adopted a gentler policy than the previous liberal government: from 1933 onwards, a half-breed not recognized by its Italian parent no longer had the status of a subject, but was given the option of becoming an Italian subject under special conditions To acquire citizenship.

Front cover of the racist magazine La difesa della razza (“Defending the Race”), 1938

After the conquest of Ethiopia, announced in 1936, the fascist regime maintained a differentiation of legal status between Libyans and East Africans; the first colonial race law of 1937 only applied to Italian East Africa . The segregation of Italian settlers and autochthonous colonial populations, as had already started in Somalia and Eritrea in part before 1936 and was pursued with increasing intensity after the conquest of Ethiopia, also took place in Libya in the first two years after the proclamation of the fascist "empire" hardly any application. However, at the end of the 1930s, North and East Africans were increasingly harmonized from a legal point of view. The first drastic change came with the Race Act of 1938 and the prohibition of "mixed marriage", which expressly included the Libyan population. The link between Italians and Africans was now seen as "harming the Italian race". A further step was taken with the second colonial race law of 1939 , with which the ban on “marriage-like relationships” and all other provisions enshrined in the law also extended to Libya.

Acquiring full Italian citizenship was no longer possible, and the newly introduced “special Italian citizenship” was not open to all Libyans. The applicants had to work in the military, the colonial police or in civil administration. In addition, only the Muslim population could obtain special citizenship, which excluded the Jewish and black African Libyans. Although the Libyans continued to receive more rights than the East Africans, they were only valid in the colonies and only as long as they did not affect the position of Italians. Therefore, Libyans could only hold positions in the military and civil administration in which they were unable to command over an Italian. The right to be elected mayor of a municipality only existed as long as no Italian was resident in that municipality. Otherwise, Libyans could only take on an advisory role in municipal administration. On the other hand, with the law of 1939 the Libyans were obliged to do military service. The policy of racial segregation applied to rural areas and cities alike. The Libyan population was forbidden to enter Italian cafes, to use taxis with Italian drivers and much more. The Italian colonizers used racism to justify their rule, to guarantee the privileges of the settlers, and thus to consolidate the “demographic colonization” on their “fourth coast”. The racist settler colonialism thus manifested itself in an Italian apartheid system . In practice, the Libyan population was segregated.

Thus - according to Aram Mattioli (2005) - Fascist Italy developed from 1938 as an "openly racist regime" long before the German occupation of its own accord into an apartheid state, which in addition to its Slavic and Jewish subjects in North and North Africa East Africa severely discriminated against and forced a "inhuman special existence". Mussolini's Italy was clearly behind the “Third Reich”, but on a level with South Africa and the American southern states “one of the most racist states in the world in the 20th century”.

Second World War

Postage stamp Italian Libya, circa 1924

About 38,000 Jews lived in Libya in 1940. Many of them were killed in World War II .

In the Africa campaign in Libya, the German Wehrmacht with the Africa Corps and Italian soldiers fought together against the British Army . On the British side, the Senussi and a 14,000-strong Libyan Arab Force fought . By 1943, the German and Italian troops were driven out of Libya. This ended the Italian rule over Libya. The Italian colonists had already been brought back to their homeland in 1942.

The Fessan then came under French, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica under British administration.

post war period

The return of Italy, advocated by Great Britain and France, as the administrative power of the UN trustee area Libya at least to Tripolitania failed with the rejection of the Bevin-Sforza Plan before the UN in 1949. As a prerequisite for this plan, Great Britain had encouraged the return of Italian settlers to Tripolitania from 1947 onwards. The settlers stayed in the country even after Libya became independent (1951/52); in 1962, around 35,000 Italians lived in Libya again. After the revolution of 1969, the Italian settlers were finally expropriated and deported under various measures and laws between 1970 and 1974.

See also

supporting documents

  1. ↑ a b c Culture of Libya ( Memento of the original dated December 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mittelmeerbasar.de
  2. ↑ a b after: Brockhaus Enzyklopädie in 20 vol. FA Brockhaus, Wiesbaden 1970. Vol. 11, p. 429.
  3. ^ Gabriele Schneider: Mussolini in Africa. The Fascist Racial Policy in the Italian Colonies 1936–1941. SH-Verlag, Cologne 2000, p. 186; This: The apartheid regime in Italian East Africa. P. 128.
  4. ^ Gabriele Schneider: Mussolini in Africa. The Fascist Racial Policy in the Italian Colonies 1936–1941. SH-Verlag, Cologne 2000, p. 186 f.
  5. ^ Gabriele Schneider: The apartheid regime in Italian East Africa. P. 128 f.
  6. ^ Gabriele Schneider: Mussolini in Africa. The Fascist Racial Policy in the Italian Colonies 1936–1941. SH-Verlag, Cologne 2000, p. 186 f.
  7. ↑ Abdulhakim Nagiah: Italy and Libya during the colonial period: Fascist rule and national resistance. In: Sabine Frank, Martina Kamp (ed.): Libya in the 20th century. Between foreign rule and national self-determination. Hamburg 1995, p. 74 f; Gabriele Schneider: Mussolini in Africa. The Fascist Racial Policy in the Italian Colonies 1936–1941. SH-Verlag, Cologne 2000, p. 186 ff.
  8. ^ Gabriele Schneider: Mussolini in Africa. The Fascist Racial Policy in the Italian Colonies 1936–1941. SH-Verlag, Cologne 2000, p. 190.
  9. ↑ Abdulhakim Nagiah: Italy and Libya during the colonial period: Fascist rule and national resistance. In: Sabine Frank, Martina Kamp (ed.): Libya in the 20th century. Between foreign rule and national self-determination. Hamburg 1995, p. 74 f.
  10. ^ Aram Mattioli: Fascist Italy - an unknown apartheid regime. In: Fritz Bauer Institute (ed.): Legal injustice: Racist injustice in the 20th century. Frankfurt am Main / New York 2005, p. 166 f u. 172 f.
  11. ↑ Munzinger Archive / Internationales Handbuch - Zeitarchiv 36/83 Libya, page 1.
  12. ^ Lothar Rathmann : History of the Arabs - from the beginnings to the present , Volume 5 (The collapse of the imperialist colonial system and the formation of sovereign Arab nation states), page 113. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1981.
  13. ↑ Gustav Fochler-Hauke (Ed.): Der Fischer Weltalmanach 1969, page 100. Frankfurt am Main 1969.
  14. ^ Lothar Rathmann : History of the Arabs - from the beginnings to the present , Volume 6 (The struggle for the development path in the Arab world), page 184. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1984.

Web links

Commons : Italian Libya  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files