Al-Rahiba and the Escalation Toward Genocide

In the preceding article we followed the Battle of Bir Bilal in the spring of 1923, in which the Cyrenaican Senussi Bedouin fighters under the leadership of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ defeated an Italian expeditionary column in the southern Saharan zone. We saw how that outcome confirmed the guerrilla strategy of the resistance, and how the Italian reaction to it grew into a revision of the colonial enterprise as a whole, military as well as political. This article follows the escalation of the conflict in the years between 1924 and 1929, and in particular the Italian strategy of starvation and collective punishment as it was carried out under General Pietro Badoglio and thereafter under General Rodolfo Graziani: a strategy that would bring forth what in modern historiography is designated as the Libyan genocide.

The Italian strategic revision

The role of the Italian colonial administration

The Italian conduct in Cyrenaica between 1929 and 1931 stood under the direction of a colonial administration whose composition reflected the Italian Fascist administrative tradition of its time. The principal figures were Pietro Badoglio as governor-general of Libya and Rodolfo Graziani as military commander-in-chief of Cyrenaica, assisted by colonial officials who under their direction conducted the local administration in practice. It was this apparatus that carried the measures of collective punishment and made them workable in practice.

In that administrative practice the Fascist ideological direction was joined to the local colonial work, and it is with this administration that the modern historiography of the Italian conduct in Libya places the legal and the moral responsibility for the human catastrophe.

In the course of 1924 and 1925 the Italian high leadership under Mussolini revised the Libyan colonial enterprise, replacing the existing approach of military expansion step by step with an approach that was both larger and harsher. The new strategy rested on a number of elements. First, the Italian military apparatus in Libya was enlarged to approximately thirty thousand men by 1927 and to more than one hundred thousand by the peak of the operations in 1930. Second, forts and logistical posts were built in the Jebel Akhdar zone, with the explicit intention of encircling the resistance and isolating it in the territory where it belonged. Third, measures of collective punishment were introduced against the local Bedouin population, which were to sever the logistical support of the resistance.

Under General Pietro Badoglio, who was appointed governor of Libya in 1929, and under General Rodolfo Graziani, who took up the military supreme command over Cyrenaica in 1930, this strategy was carried out in full. Badoglio’s administrative direction and Graziani’s military execution together formed the framework within which Italian colonial policy applied its methods to the Cyrenaican population.

General Rodolfo Graziani

General Rodolfo Graziani, born in 1882 at Filettino in central Italy, was an Italian colonial officer who had acquired practical experience of colonial military suppression in Libya, in Eritrea and in Somalia before he was sent to Cyrenaica. There he carried out a series of methods that grew steadily harsher and in which the usual Italian colonial conventions were drawn through in a distinctly Fascist sense. For the Cyrenaican population his appointment began a phase of increasing suffering, in which the existence and the cohesion of the local communities themselves would be damaged.

His methods came down to a few basic forms that would take their full effect in the years afterwards. He had the local Bedouin men who stood under suspicion of supporting the resistance executed; he had the local palm groves and water sources destroyed, by which the economic foundation of the communities was damaged; and he had the concentration camps built in which the ordinary Bedouin population would be gathered in a condition of forced displacement.

The concentration camps

From 1929 onward the concentration camps were built in Cyrenaica, and with them the whole local Bedouin population of the Jebel Akhdar zone was moved under compulsion into the sand plains of the eastern Saharan zone. The principal camps were established at the places al-Agheila, al-Magrun, Suluq and Sidi Ahmed Magrun, and besides these at several other remote locations; together they received approximately one hundred thousand Cyrenaican Bedouin, under conditions of hunger, thirst, disease and oppression.

For the ordinary Bedouin families the deportation was a loss that took many forms. They had to leave their ancestral grazing lands and covered marches of several hundred kilometres under Italian military escort, on which some of them succumbed to exhaustion and to Italian neglect of provisioning. In the camps themselves the further privations followed, with mass mortality from hunger and disease, on a scale that according to modern demographic estimates cost approximately forty thousand Cyrenaican Bedouin up to the end of the nineteen-thirties. Measured against a Cyrenaican population that in 1928 numbered approximately two hundred thousand souls, that was a demographic catastrophe which damaged the cohesion of the Cyrenaican Bedouin people at its core.

The forced displacement

The Cyrenaican order rested on a seasonal movement between the Saharan winter grazing lands and the summer grazing lands of the Jebel Akhdar, and the displacement to the concentration camps broke that movement off for good. The ordinary Bedouin households had to leave their ancestral grazing lands and their herds behind, by which the economic order of Cyrenaican Bedouin society was damaged at its foundation. In that economy the herds were the form in which wealth and communal prosperity existed; they were lost or confiscated, and in both cases they were withdrawn from their ordinary owners.

There were deaths on the way to the camps as well. From the testimonies of survivors, insofar as these have been preserved in later records, it appears that the marches through the vast Saharan conditions cost human lives: elderly people who could not sustain the exertion of the journey, children who succumbed to exhaustion and dehydration, and wounded from earlier armed resistance who did not survive the march. Together they form the counts in which the scale of the human catastrophe of the displacement becomes visible.

The punitive expedition at al-Rahiba

One event out of this escalation has been kept with particular attention in the Cyrenaican tradition, and from it this article takes its title: the confrontation that occurred at al-Rahiba in 1927 or 1928. Al-Rahiba lay in the Jebel Akhdar zone, at a distance of approximately forty kilometres south of al-Bayda, and it became the scene of an Italian punitive expedition against a Cyrenaican village, in which the nature of the Italian colonial oppression showed itself in full.

The local population of al-Rahiba was placed under suspicion in 1927 or early 1928 of supporting a Cyrenaican adwar unit that had operated in the neighbouring mountains, and the Italian punitive expedition thereupon carried out executions, burned the houses down, destroyed the local palm groves and deported the survivors to the concentration camps. The event has been preserved in detail in the local Bedouin tradition, and in the years afterwards it was remembered repeatedly in the Friday sermons of the Cyrenaican Muslim communities, in a commemoration that would keep the morale of the continuing resistance high.

What the deportations cost the resistance

For the Cyrenaican resistance under Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ the measures of the Italian colonial oppression meant a strategic crisis, in which the continuation of the struggle called for a fundamental reorientation. The resistance had always run on the communal support of the local Bedouin families: on their food supply, on their hiding places and on the information that was passed along through them. With the deportation of those families to the concentration camps that foundation fell away.

For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ himself this meant an adjustment of his guerrilla strategy, in which his fighters were thrown ever more upon the Saharan zone and the operations had to be continued as a struggle of attrition. In these years he held long discussions with his closest associates about the forms the Cyrenaican resistance could still take, and with spiritual steadfastness he held the morale of the resistance up in a remarkable way.

The Egyptian border line

In the course of 1929 one measure became of central strategic importance: the border line that the Italian authorities laid along the Cyrenaican-Egyptian frontier in order to restrict substantially the freedom of movement of the Cyrenaican fighters between Cyrenaica and the friendly Egyptian territory. The line was approximately two hundred kilometres long and equipped with barbed wire in great quantity, with fortified posts at fixed intervals, with patrols of Italian troops and with a system of control, and it restricted the Cyrenaican freedom of movement severely.

For the Cyrenaican resistance that line was a strategic challenge, for it cut off the support that the Cyrenaican refugees in Egypt gave to the armed fighters in Cyrenaica. Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ undertook several operations against the border line in 1930 in an attempt to undermine it, but the Italian fortifications were sufficient to keep the result of those attempts limited.

The genocide in the historiography

In modern historiography the outcome of the Italian colonial oppression in Cyrenaica in the years between 1929 and 1931 is increasingly designated as genocide, in an assessment that regards the mass mortality in the concentration camps, the destruction of the local economic foundations and the Italian political and military oppression as one connected whole. The demographic picture, with approximately one third to one half of the Cyrenaican Bedouin population succumbing in these years according to modern estimates, was a confirmation of that classification.

For the Italian state after the Second World War, and in particular after the reckoning with the Italian colonial legacy in the second half of the twentieth century, Libyan colonial history remained a sensitive historical subject, one that was acknowledged publicly only in the twenty-first century. The Italian state offered a formal apology to Libya in 2008, in a joint declaration of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the then Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, by which Italian colonial history was placed in a historical reflection.

The scale of the concentration camps

In the separate counts per camp the human scale of the deportations becomes visible, and with it the Italian colonial oppression in its final form. Al-Agheila received approximately twenty thousand deported Bedouin, al-Magrun approximately fifteen thousand, Suluq approximately twenty thousand and Sidi Ahmed Magrun approximately thirty thousand, while further camps received further counts that confirmed the scale of the Italian colonial conduct in Cyrenaica.

The living conditions in the camps were those of continuous human privation. The deported Bedouin were housed in tents and ordinary huts, which offered no protection against the vast Saharan weather of heat in the summer and cold in the winter. The food rations were insufficient for ordinary human need and the supplies were poor in protein, so that malnutrition arose among the detainees.

The medical condition

The medical condition in the camps was tragic, and the infectious diseases that went round there cost many lives. In the summers of 1930 and 1931 cholera epidemics broke out, with a mortality that led to thousands of Bedouin succumbing; tuberculosis went round among the deported population, with consequences of longer duration that would resonate in the survivors of the camps; and measles outbreaks among the children of the camps brought about a child mortality that damaged the demographic condition of the Cyrenaican Bedouin population.

The Italian medical provision in the camps remained limited, with insufficient facilities, insufficient medicines and insufficient medical personnel. For the Italian colonial authorities the mortality in the camps formed no cause for concern; it was received as an acceptable consequence of the colonial pacification.

The turning point

What the Italian colonial conduct in Cyrenaica between 1929 and 1931 left behind was a tragedy that struck Cyrenaican Bedouin society as a whole. The Cyrenaican Bedouin population fell back from approximately two hundred thousand souls in 1928 to approximately one hundred and twenty thousand by 1933, a decrease that in modern demographic analysis is designated as genocide. For the Italian colonial authorities that outcome meant the final pacification of the Cyrenaican resistance, and with it the conclusion of the reconquest of the “Fourth Shore” for the Italian colonial enterprise.

The international indifference

One aspect of the Italian colonial conduct in Cyrenaica sets modern historiography a moral challenge: the indifference with which the world of its time received the human results. The League of Nations, the international organization that had been established in 1920 for international exchange, devoted no formal attention to the Italian colonial conduct in Libya, nor did it send investigative missions there. The international press devoted some limited attention to the human consequences of the Italian colonial oppression, but the reception of the Cyrenaican events remained one of indifference.

For modern historiography and for modern moral reflection that indifference is a challenge whose result still resonates in post-colonial reflection.

Toward the end of the struggle

In this article we have followed the escalation of the Italian colonial policy in Cyrenaica in the years between 1924 and 1929: the strategic revision under Mussolini, the appointment of General Rodolfo Graziani as military commander-in-chief of Cyrenaica, the building of the concentration camps that caused mortality among the Cyrenaican Bedouin population, the event of al-Rahiba as a specific example of Italian punitive methods, and the construction of the Egyptian border line in 1929, which substantially restricted the freedom of movement of the Cyrenaican resistance. We also saw how the outcome of the Italian colonial oppression is increasingly designated as genocide in modern historiography. To the end of the struggle in 1931, and to the capture of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ in September of that same year in an ambush in the Slonta area, the next article will devote its attention.

Sources

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• Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History, Routledge (2020), pp. 1–112.
• Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya, State University of New York Press (2009), pp. 294–334.
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• E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Clarendon Press (1949), pp. 214–248.
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