Capital

Historical Notes on Books, 2

Hakim Workneh, Ethiopia, and the Libyan War

Ethiopia's diplomatic representative in England at the time of the Italian Fascist invasion in 1935-6 was Hakim Martin, also known as Dr W.C. Martin, whom as a child I had the pleasure to meet. He was a medical man - and who even advised on one or two occasions when I succumbed to childish diseases.
Propaganda
From his little office in West London's Princes Gate he had to face the seemingly all-powerful Propaganda Machine of Fascist Italy - which churned out propaganda by the cartload. It was reported that within the month of October 1935 the Fascist embassy had distributed no less that 138,000 copies of a Fascist propaganda work, Professor G.C. Baravelli's Last Stronghold of Slavery - and that a further 53,000 copies had been reprinted. Later that month the Italian Ambassador in London reported to the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini that his Embassy had a list of no less than 30,000 addresses in the United Kingdom, to which his staff was sending communications. With the latter they circulated the full text of the Fascist government's address on the Italo-Ethiopian dispute to the League of Nations, a reprint of which ran to a further 53,000 copies. I cite these figures, dear reader, from our friend the late Daniel Waley's authoritative monograph British Public Opinion and the Abyssinian War 1935-6.
Islam
One of the Fascist allegations which Dr Martin sought to challenge was Mussolini's claim to be the Guardian of Islam - a claim designed to win international Muslim support for Fascist aggression, as well as to weaken Ethiopian resistance, by dividing the Ethiopian population on the basis of Muslim versus Christian.
In challenging Mussolini's claim Dr Martin had the support of several of London's Italian Anti-fascists, from whom he obtained a copy an important book published over two decades earlier, in 1912. This was Francis McCullagh's now largely forgotten work Italy's War for a Desert, which bore the sub-title: "… Some Experiences of a War-Correspondent with the Italians in Tripoli."
This book was a highly significant - and topical - in that it showed that Italian colonial repression preceded the invasion of Ethiopia, and that the Italian colonial troops had displayed little or no respect for the indigenous population.
Dr Martin had a high regard for Francis McCullagh's book, and produced a sixteen page pamphlet based on it . This today little-known publication - a unique document in its way - was entitled Italian Atrocities in Tripoli in 1911, and appeared in English, with an Arabic translation, and 9 photographs of Italian troops in Libya - and their wartime victims.
Dr Martin was a great humanitarian. His guiding principle, "the fundamental rule of all religions", as he saw it, was: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". This was a message he was to repeat in several articles published at around this time in my mother's weekly newspaper New Times and Ethiopia News.
In reading McCullagh's book Dr Martin saw an alarming thread of continuity between Italy's conquest of Tripoli in 1911 and the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935-6.
This is apparent in his Italian Atrocities pamphlet in which he criticized the "bloodthirsty Italian jingoists" of 1911, who preceded Mussolini, and who, as McCullagh wrote:
"believe in war for war's sake. They believe that the shedding of blood makes a nation virile, unifies it, intensifies the[ir] patriotism... Their motto is: 'If you feel decadent, go out and murder somebody".
Such thinking had re-surfaced, Dr Martin argued, under the Duce. This is confirmed, we may comment, in Mussolini's famous article on Fascism in the Encyclopedia Italiana, as well as in not a few of his more militaristic utterances, such as:
"Though words are beautiful things, rifles, machine-guns and cannons are still more beautiful"
and:
"War is to man as maternity is to woman".
Dr Martin's today little-known pamphlet was written in a spirit of pan-African brotherhood - though the word did not yet exist in 1911, but it was also written to warn the Muslim world to have no illusion about Mussolini's supposed support for Islam. To that end he quotes McCullagh as describing a massacre in Libya, which followed particularly fierce fighting.
He writes:
"On October 25th and 26th, 1911, the Italians began an indiscriminate slaughter of even the peaceful Arabs. For although the massacres had been going on for days, they reached their terrible climax on the morning of the 26th when the troops seem to have gone mad with the lust for blood. All the Arabs they met, men, women and children, even babes at he breast - were shot down without trial, no attempt being made to ascertain whether they were guilty or innocent… 4,000 Arabs perished in this way, in the space of three days".
This account, McCullagh adds, was confirmed by the Reuter correspondent, Ellis Bartleet, who wrote:
"During the whole progress over a distance of two miles we never saw a single living Arab - man, woman or child. Lying just outside the outpost line, was another group of about fifty men and boys, who had evidently been taken out there on the previous day and shot en masse. Several of them had been bayoneted or slashed with swords, and one man had his head completely smashed in …"
Dr Martin wrote his pamphlet shortly before the Addis Ababa massacre of February 1937, in which two of his own sons perished - and which caused Rodolfo Graziani, the then Fascist viceroy of Ethiopia, to be nick-named not only the Hyena of Libya, but also the Butcher of Addis Ababa.
Dr Martin, a great humanitarian, would have been heartened to see the subsequent eradication of Fascism - and the emergence of today's peaceful and democratic Italy.