Genocide in Libya

Shar, a Hidden Colonial History

Ali Abdullatif Ahmida

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000169362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Winner of the L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies 2022

This original research on the forgotten Libyan genocide specifically recovers the hidden history of the fascist Italian concentration camps (1929–1934) through the oral testimonies of Libyan survivors. This book links the Libyan genocide through cross-cultural and comparative readings to the colonial roots of the Holocaust and genocide studies.

Between 1929 and 1934, thousands of Libyans lost their lives, directly murdered and victim to Italian deportations and internments. They were forcibly removed from their homes, marched across vast tracks of deserts and mountains, and confined behind barbed wire in 16 concentration camps. It is a story that Libyans have recorded in their Arabic oral history and narratives while remaining hidden and unexplored in a systematic fashion, and never in the manner that has allowed us to comprehend and begin to understand the extent of their existence.

Based on the survivors' testimonies, which took over ten years of fieldwork and research to document, this new and original history of the genocide is a key resource for readers interested in genocide and Holocaust studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and African and Middle Eastern studies.

1

Where are the survivors?

The politics of missing archives and fieldwork

Thus, the files which have finally been made available to independent researchers in recent years have been skimmed of documents considered to be of major importance. Despite this gap the official Italian state version of history manufactured the publication of the volumes in the collection entitled L’Italia in Africa.

Italian historian Giorgio Rochat on the silence of Italian Archiveson the concentration camps in Libya, in Santarelli et al., eds.Omar al-Mukhtar translated by John Gilbert (London: Darf Publishers, 1986) 39, 40

Despairing, entrenched days and nights

Forced me to dream of sleep and its solace

Telling others about it would be gossip

Yet they make me cry

My mood swings back and forth

They leave impossible, tangled knots

Only God may open these doors of Salvation

Only God can overcome them

Poet Muhammad Zaidanal-Sharif, 1935

We keep talking about what happened to us in the camps to stay alive; the stories keep us alive.

Haj Yusuf Said al-Bal’azi al-‘Aquri, a survivor,Agaila concentration camp

On September 11, 1931, the Italian army brought the captured ‘Umar al-Mukhtar, the leader of the anti-colonial resistance, to the concentration camp of Slug, and forced over 20,000 interned people including the old, children, men, and women to attend the hanging of their old, beloved leader. After this public hanging spectacle, the soldiers took the corpse and buried him in a secret grave. The stories of the resistance and the interment of the rural people of eastern Libya are interconnected. Two factors are crucial to understand the making of the Italian genocide: the well-organized and mobilized anti-resistance, and the censorship, the manipulation of the evidence, and the propaganda to cover what happened during and after the internment. The struggle to overcome dead ends and to piece together the story of what happened was long, complex, and frustrating as data was hidden, and most survivors are dying and the evidence is on the verge of disappearing. The complex research journey and the hard task of piecing together the story of what happened became as significant as the history of the genocide. It reveals the impact of the power of knowledge and it helps to explain why this case disappeared from Western scholarship for a long time.

I argue that the internment of the civilian population of Barqa was linked to the resilience of the anti-colonial resistance, and the racist fascist ideology. The anti-colonial resistance was deeply rooted in local society and culture and an in innovative social movement, called the Sanusiyya, which unified and integrated society 50 years earlier during the second half of the nineteenth century, prior to the Italian invasion in 1911. Consequently, the settler colonialism, resistance, native culture and institutions, and the concentration camps as genocidal reaction are all interlinked and essential for interrogating the history of colonial policy and the native social and cultural reactions. The main sources for the study were the colonial archives, the survivors’ oral history, and the poetry composed to record the facts and the emotional and human expressions of this tragic phase.

This chapter will map out four interrelated sources and topics of the book: the historical and social bases of the anti-colonial resistance of eastern Libya; a critical analysis of the public and private archives in various locations and countries; oral history and interviews; and, finally, my multiple fieldwork visits to the five concentration camps. Prior to this stage, I had a long period of searching for the files and the primary material on this period. I still remember my initial visit to the Italian Archives, decades ago in 1986.

In the fall of 1986, I traveled to Italy to investigate the National Archives at the Italian Foreign Ministry in Rome. I arrived with a strong recommendation from a respected Italian sociologist, Franco Ferrarotti, and friend of one of my professors, Dan Chirot, at the University of Washington. After spending one week at the National Achives, I was told by an apologetic employee that I could not continue my research. I asked her why, and she informed me that it was because I was of Libyan origin, and, as her boss claimed, because Libyan officials bar Italian scholars from doing research in Libya, no Libyan scholars are therefore allowed to conduct research in Italian Archives. This was after I had asked to check the files on the concentration camps. I tried to keep an open mind about this encounter in Rome. I traveled to Tripoli, Libya the next year and I asked Dr. Mohamed Jerary, the director of the Libyan Studies Center Jihad, about the Italian official’s claims. He informed me the claim was false and introduced me to two Italian scholars who had full access to the Center’s primary sources. Later on, I faced other challenges when I tried to find the survivors and gain their trust and approval to talk to me.

In the early summer of 2000, I shared a proposal on my research project on the Italian Fascist concentration camps in Libya with my friend, the Ottoman historian Rifa’at Abou-El-Haj. My project was aimed at shedding light on the atrocities that occurred in Libya under the Italian Fascist regime by focusing on the survivors’ testimonies and the lives it has affected since then. My seasoned senior friend proposed that I focused on the narratives of the survivors, their reactions, and culture. He added that this undertaking would take about ten years, and I am afraid he was right. Indeed, I have faced dead ends, limited access to Italian Archives, missing files, and, later on, a cover-up of the evidence. Also, I realized in researching this topic that it requires not only collaborative work and multidisciplinary knowledge in political science, but also within social history, theory, and comparative cross-cultural methods. Inevitably, the reader needs to understand the historical context of the genocide and the tough journey of discovery of finding out why there were dead ends and the hidden evidence kept in oral and poetic sources by the survivors and their families. The challenges were both empirical and ethical: how to find the archival evidence and how to read it, and, as insider/outsider native anthropologist and social historian, how to gain the trust of the survivors and reflect about power and social science and the purpose of scholarship.

The challenges I encountered included research that was in three languages and was fragmented. Additionally, some of the documents pertaining to the genocide have been either destroyed or removed. Furthermore, conducting fieldwork and oral interviews required trust, contacts, and the willingness of the survivors and their families to recount their stories. Such epistemological and historical research required time, patience, and rethinking of archival, anthropological, and oral history methods of conducting fieldwork and interviews. I realized that the modern Libyan elite after independence in 1951, the monarchy, and the nationalist military coup in 1969 did not preserve the sites of the concentration camps or repair them, and most of the survivors of the interment are dying from old age and health-related issues. My multidisciplinary background in comparative analysis, social history, and anthropology enabled me to deconstruct the complexity of the Libyan genocide and the politics of memory in Libya, Italy, and contemporary scholarship after World War II. Prior to narrating and navigating these historical and methodological challenges, a mapping of the historical roots of anti-colonial resistance in eastern Libya will introduce the context which led to the fascist interment and genocide of the whole civilian population of the eastern region, Barqa. The region went through social, educational, and economic transformation under a reformist socioreligious movement called the Sanusiyya during the second half of the nineteenth century. This indigenous social movement integrated the population and created powerful institutions that enabled people to fight European imperialism, specifically, the Italian occupation from 1911 to 1932. The region of Barqa was a Sanusi stronghold that refused to be governed by either Ottoman or Italian states. To understand the reactions of the interned civilian population one has to study both the Sanusiyya and the social bases of the anti-colonial resistance.

Historical context to the internment: anti-colonial resistance in eastern Libya 1911–1932

The Sanusiyya emerged as the most influential anti-colonial socioreligious movement rooted in Islamic traditions and institutions in eastern and southern Libya, and which then expanded to the central Sahara and western Egypt during the second half of the nineteenth century. It became one of many resistance movements that appeared in the Middle East and East, West, and North Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The other notable movements were the Mahdiyya in Sudan and the Maji Maji in Tanjanika (today Tanzania), among others. It was based in the Islamic and regional culture of Barqa, and the revivalist traditions of the Maghrib and the Sahara, and above all in the historical context of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The rise of these revival and resistance movements came as a reaction to the decline of Oriental trade, as was the case of the Wahhabi movement in Arabia in the eighteenth century, while the Mahdiyya and the Sanusiyya emerged as a reaction to the weakening of the Muslim states (Ottoman and Egyptian) to counter the colonialist British in the Sudan and the French in North Africa. Just as Sufi movements had led the anti-Iberian attacks on Morocco in the sixteenth century, new Sufi reformist movements, such as the Sanusiyya, Mahdiyyia, and the Maji Maji resistance against German colonialism, took the initiative to organize local resistance against European imperialism in the late nineteenth century. This should not be surprising as people expressed themselves through their own culture, living North African and Saharan Islamic values and institutions linked to socioeconomic conditions. The Sanusi movement was a remarkable reformist movement based on new interpretations and new organizational choices which took root in the second half of the nineteenth century. These innovations, such as focusing on education and trade, were choices that allowed the movement to integrate several groups and communities in a new society that was Islamic but also rooted in local traditions. The Sanusi movement also provided new answers for the challenges of trade, disputes, and how to face the calamity of European imperialism.

The Sanusiyya movement was named after its founder, an urban Sharifian scholar from Algeria by the name of Muhammad b. Ali al-Sanusi (1787–1859), better known as “the Grand Sanusi.” He was a scholar who had studied in Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, and in al-Hijaz in Arabia. His order, the Sanusiyya, stressed austerity, moral commitment, self-reliance, and anti-colonial resistance. The main goal of the Sanusi was to build a coherent, unified community through education, work, and self-reliance, based on local institutions and resources. The order was built on an Islamic model of state taxation, law, education, and mobilization for jihad – or the defense of the faith. The Sanusiyya relied on the North African Sufi institution of zawiya, or lodge, which began to emerge in the fourteenth century, as Sufi orders assumed the leadership of the resistance against the Iberian crusade in Spain and North Africa. The zawiya was a place for worship, a center for the followers of a given brotherhood, a sanctuary, and a shrine where the murabit, or founders of a brotherhood, were buried.

The Grand Sanusi adapted his reformist call to the needs of tribesmen and merchants. His call for simple Islamic practice appealed to many poor tribesmen, and his emphasis on ijtihad, meaning opening the gates for reasoning and individual morality, was attractive to the merchants of the Sahara. Therefore, many seminomadic and trading tribes became Sanusi followers, such as the Zintan, Rijban, and Awlad Busaif of the Gibla, the Awlad Sulayman of Sirte and Fezzen, and some of the Tibbu and Tuareg of Fezzen and Chad. Among the merchant tribes in the Sahara who became Sanusi were the Zuwayya, the Majabra, and the Ghadamsiyya.

By 1870, a Sanusi lodge was more than a place to worship. It was a mosque, a children’s school, a residence of the shaykh, the head of the lodge and his family, a guesthouse for travelers, an accommodation for caravans and refugees, and a storehouse for supplies and caravan goods. The management of each lodge consisted of a head ikhwan (the brotherhood), a shaykh or muqadm (leader), a Sanusi administrator or wakil, and a third, aide, or agha. This staff educated people, led prayers, collected religious taxes from tribes and caravans, invested in the Sahara trade on behalf of the order, and acted as judges and arbitrators among tribesmen. The Sanusiyya, comprising a de facto state, provided an elaborate socioeconomic and legal organization for the tribes and the Sahara trade. It supplied the trade with a network of communication and administrative structures through its lodges and missionaries, equivalent in strength to the Ottoman state bureaucracy and town markets in Tripolitania.¹

The order unified traders, religious scholars, and the tribal divisions of Barqa, as well as the dwellers of Jalu, Awjila, Siwa, and other Saharan oases. A general policy of its leaders was to avoid Ottoman strongholds along the coast. The three capitals of the order were all major stations of the trans-Sahara trade between Wadai and Barqa: Jaghbub (1856–1895); Kufra (1895–1898); and Quru, in today’s northern Chad (1899–1902). The Sahara trade became a crucial source of revenue for the order after the 1870s, and a network for its missionaries in the Greater Sahara.

The Sanusiyya’s success as the major religious social movement in late nineteenth-century North Africa and the Sahara resulted from the Sanusi’s ability to transcend ethnic and local tribal identifications. The order provided a supra-tribal and ethnic institution for the Sahara trade. This unity became a key to anti-colonial resistance in Barqa, more so than in Tripolitania, where factionalism among the notables in the nineteenth century weakened the resistance and led to its defeat in 1922. In Barqa, the resistance continued till 1932.

The coming of European colonialism tipped the balance of power in the Sahara. First, French expansion into Bilad al-Sudan posed a threat to the Sanusi influence. The Sanusi fought the French army in what is today’s Chad from 1897 to 1910. Second, the Italians invaded Libya in 1911. Third, the Sanusi fought with the Ottoman Turks against the British in western Egypt in 1916. The Sanusi leadership faced these new threats with two strategies. The first strategy was to invite the Ottomans to Sanusi territory in Barqa to benefit from the Ottoman Empire’s legal, diplomatic, and military status. Therefore, when the Sanusi forces were defeated in Chad in 1902 at Bir’Alali, Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif, the head of the order, asked the Ottoman authorities to send a governor to Kufra, the center of the order. This policy was effective as evidenced by the French army’s inability to expand into Kufra.

The real threat to the Sanusi order came from the north, beginning with the Italian invasion of Libya in the October of 1911. When the Ottoman Empire signed a peace treaty with Italy in 1912, the threat became even greater. The Ottomans, after the Italian attack on Ottoman strongholds, were too weak to wage a full-scale war against Italy. They signed a peace treaty, left Libya, and, to avoid embarrassment, granted independence to the Libyans. Left alone, the Sanusi declared jihad the ideology of their independent state in 1913. This was part of the second strategy.²

Italy first began to prepare for the conquest of Tripolitania in the 1890s. Italian banks, schools, and newspapers began to flourish, especially in the city of Tripoli and powerful Jewish and Muslim merchants were contacted by Italian consuls in Tripoli as early as 1890. Some of them collaborated with the colonial elite to further their commercial interests. Finally, in 1907, the Bank of Rome became the vehicle for buying land, investing in trade, and employing key people to work for the Italian cause.

Italian colonial policy faced strong resistance, which led to colonial compromises, especially when Italy entered World War I in 1914. Between 1914 and 1922, autonomy and self-rule were granted to the Libyans because of their resistance. However, the policy was changed by the fascists in 1923. The Italian Fascist government pushed the colonial plan of the “liberals” to full scale, dec...