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Chapter XVII: The Portuguese Colonial War, Italian Colonial Reform and Neo-colonial Conflict, 1962-1973.
Update 
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In 1961, in the meantime, an uprising had started in Angola against Portuguese rule, which was the natural product of a wave of civil disobedience that had begun in 1948. In January 1961 there’d been a peasant revolt at Baixa de Cassanje with the peasants demanding better pay and improvement to their working conditions. The Portuguese military responded to the rebellion by bombing villages in the area with napalm, killing anywhere between 400 and 7.000 indigenous Africans. In February, about fifty militants stormed a police station and Sao Paolo prison, killing seven policemen while forty militants died and no prisoners were freed. The UPA (later known as the FNLA) and the MPLA fought the Portuguese as well as each other, with all sides committing atrocities, and in the first year of the war up to 30.000 Angolans were killed by Portuguese forces. The UPA kicked off the war by massacring 1.000 white and 6.000 black civilians, but they were soon driven out of the country into Zaire. From there the UPA continued its attacks, creating more refugees and more terror among local communities. The violence became so terrible that the UN Security Council drew up Resolution 163, calling on Portugal to desist from repressive measures against the Angolan people. Italy vetoed this resolution, arguing that Portuguese colonial rule was the only thing preventing communist revolution, and drew the ire of the Soviets in doing so.
The MPLA received support from the USSR, East Germany and Cuba while Italy supplied Portugal with all the modern weapons, ammunition, fuel and “military advisors” it needed. The white minority regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa also supported Portugal, fearing the effects of an independent Angola on their own black majority population. The other San Remo Pact powers provided some weapons and financial support as well, but didn’t provide military support of their own. In the meantime, the supposed military advisors Italy sent were in fact two elite regiments of Bersaglieri and two squadrons of fighter-bombers. They did little advising and a lot of fighting. In terms of firepower the Portuguese military was superior, but of course there’s more to a guerrilla war than just that. A new group called UNITA broke off from the FNLA in 1966 and twice derailed a train transporting Zambian copper through Angola, prompting Zambia to kick them out. UNITA leader Savimbi secretly entered Angola through Zambia and worked with the Portuguese military against the MPLA.
At the annual summit Ciano flat-out told Portuguese Prime Minister Caetano that Italy wouldn’t support the Portuguese effort forever, most certainly not if Portugal would continue to refuse to improve the living standards of its colonial subjects. Ciano heavily pressured him to do so, threatening to withdraw his troops. In 1965, therefore, Caetano therefore passed a revolutionary colonial act that initiated a ten-year plan to uplift the indigenous Africans and integrate Angola as a true overseas province of the Lusotropical Empire. He largely imitated Italian assimilatory policies, moving away from separation and segregation. To enlist local support, the Portuguese army started to promote indigenous soldiers to positions of command, initially only to junior ranks up to sergeant-major but by 1970 also middle ranks up to major and (more rarely) lieutenant-colonel. In other words, Angolans had the opportunity to rise up in the ranks to the point of commanding a battalion.
Besides that, after 500 years of colonial rule, Portugal had failed to produce any native black governors, mayors, headmasters, police inspectors, or professors due to racist policies that had denied Angolans equal and adequate education. In the decade after 1965, hundreds of elementary schools, thirty vocational schools, two dozen secondary schools, one military academy and one university were founded. From the late 1960s, blacks could not only have a military career but could also rise in the colonial administration. By the early 1970s there were several thousand black civil servants, varying from office clerks to teachers and policemen. 1974 would see the first black mayor. Inspired by the Italians, the Portuguese also built villages for loyal soldiers and black civil servants and each had its own church, elementary school, library, small hospital, sport grounds and a small cinema or theatre. The intensity of the guerrilla weakened, especially after 1970 when Africans were officially granted legal equality with whites. In keeping with Portugal’s supposed tradition of miscegenation laws were passed that forbade discrimination of interracial couples.
Italy’s own colonies remained quiet for most of the 1960s because Italian rule remained fairly popular due to its assimilatory policies. In 1962, there was a brief border war with Chad, which had gained its independence from France two years prior: though the Aouzou Strip had been signed over to Italy in the 1935 Franco-Italian Agreement, both parties had failed to ratify the agreement; despite this the newer border was conventionally assumed to be the southern frontier of Italian Libya. Chad’s first President François Tombalbaye had established an autocratic one-party dictatorship marked with insensitive mismanagement that exacerbated interethnic tensions. He tried to rally support, particularly Muslim support, by portraying Italy as a foreign bogeyman because it illegally occupied the north of the country, inhabited predominantly by Muslims. A few incursions into the Aouzou Strip took place, and the Chadians already noticed that the local populace had little interested in being “liberated” by them. The Regia Aeronautica and Italian armour responded to these incursions by obliterating the intruding Chadian armed forces. Tombalbaye was deposed and sentenced to house arrest by a moderately pro-French regime which recognized the Aouzou Strip as part of Italian Libya. That way France and Italy both got what they wanted: Italy kept the disputed territory while Chad would keep looking to its former colonizer for protection for the foreseeable future.
By the early 1970s, however, some dissent started to develop in Libya. Italian policies to integrate and assimilate its colonial subjects, to give them legal equality and to provide a high standard of living had ensured the popularity of their rule from the 1930s onward. The Libyans, however, still weren’t very involved in the administration of their country. Sure, the colonial state and the army provided career opportunities and socioeconomic advancement, but the higher up positions were still de facto reserved for Italians. There weren’t many native mayors, provincial governors were all Italian and no Libyans were to be found in the senior staff of the Governor-General’s office in Tripoli. Educated Libyans felt that if they, as Italian Muslim Arabs, were legally equal to citizens from Italian origins then they should also have an equal say in how Libya was governed.
One of these educated Libyans was Muammar Gaddafi, born in 1942 in a tent near the coastal city of Sirte, and he was illustrative of Libya’s transition from a society of nomads and farmers to an urban, sedentary middle class society. He was born into an un-influential tribal group known as the Qadhadhfa, who were Arabized Berber in heritage, to parents who earned a meagre subsistence as goat and camel herders. Determined to raise his standard of living and encouraged by the token tuition fees of Italian vocational schools Muammar’s father Abu Meniar Gaddafi learned the trade of bench mechanic. Initially this supplemented his income, but when he got a fulltime job in Sirte in his trade it supplanted his herder existence and he sold most of his goats and camels. Muammar, in the meantime, went to one of the government elementary schools and proved remarkably intelligent, passing through six grades in four years and learning to speak Italian fluently. Simultaneously he was enrolled in the Arab Lictor Youth, the youth branch of the Muslim Association of the Lictor (in turn the Muslim branch of the National Fascist Party). Gaddafi then enrolled in Sirte’s secondary school and was noticed by his teachers for his high grades and his popularity with his fellow students. Exceptionally, his principal wrote a letter of commendation to the education department of the Governor-General’s office.
This ensured that the now 17 year-old Gaddafi, part of a small select group of young Libyans, was allowed to enrol in the Sapienza University of Rome in 1959. His chosen area of study was philosophy and he was educated in the thought of many Western philosophers, scientists, political theorists, economists and sociologists: Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Gustave Le Bon, Georges Sorel and Vilfredo Pareto. He took notes from all of them. In October 1962 he witnessed Mussolini’s speech on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the March on Rome and was inspired to acquire oratory skills of his own, taking acting lessons. In the meantime, in 1963, the now 21 year-old Gaddafi completed a 77 page master paper titled “Sorel’s Social Myth and Violence coupled with Pareto’s Elite Concept.” In his paper he elaborated on how the elites defined by Pareto could use a combination of force and social myth to break the cycle of taking risks, running into catastrophe, becoming weak and humanitarian, and ultimately being replaced by new elites. In his paper he also elaborated on Marxism and called it an ideology that was “admirably idealistic, but realistically impractical” and said that historical materialism “ignores the intervention of exceptional individuals from Hannibal to Napoleon Bonaparte.” His professors considered it good enough to help him publish it as an article.
In 1963 Gaddafi returned home, but despite his education couldn’t get a better job than manager of the mailroom of Sirte’s social office and substitute teacher. From the mid 60s he started to feel disgruntled and disenfranchised and jotted down his thoughts in a diary that he started to keep. He noted that an Italian with similar academic achievements would have had a well-paid, prestigious job by age 25. In 1970, the 28 year-old Gaddafi still was a glorified office clerk and also worked as a substitute teacher in philosophy at a secondary school. Frustrated as he was, he started to give speeches wherever educated Libyans congregated. All of them boiled down to this: the Italian rulers said one thing but did another when they said that Libyans were citizens with equal rights; if Italians could get high government positions, then why couldn’t Libyans? In 1971 he formed the “Philosophy Discussion Group of Sirte” which was a front Gaddafi used to give “lectures” across the country in which he encouraged Libyans to protest against unfair treatment. Everywhere he went he got signatures for a petition, which he mailed to Governor-General Giorgio Almirante in 1972, by which time he had gathered tens of thousands of signatures. When no response was given Gaddafi encouraged a campaign of non-violent resistance, upon which Almirante ordered the OVRA to arrest him and charge him with disturbing the peace. Rioting erupted, particularly in Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte, even though the sentence was likely to be a gag order and a few months in jail or, very possibly, internal exile somewhere in the Italian Empire.
With ongoing and growing civil unrest Ciano started to fear the possibility of a full-blown colonial war like the one Portugal was fighting (although serious reforms had weakened the support for the anti-Portuguese resistance, soaking off moderates to the colonial regime). A colonial war would endanger many Italian lives since by the early 70s about 35% of Libya’s population was ethnically Italian. Also, by now, there was a sizeable Libyan community in parts of Italy that could be cultivated by anti-Italian opposition. Ciano didn’t have any interest in a colonial war nor did he have an interest in terrorist attacks in Italy itself, both of which France had seen in its conflict in Algeria. Under pressure from Rome, the court in Tripoli declared Gaddafi not guilty and ordered his immediate release. Since he was officially still a member of the Muslim Association of the Lictor, the Muslim branch of the National Fascist Party, a party and state career was still possible (in fact, party membership was a de facto requirement for a serious career). In a radical move, Gaddafi was appointed governor of Misurata Province, in which Sirte was located, becoming the first provincial governor of Libyan origins. Libya was pacified and slowly but surely similar reforms were undertaken in Albania, Eritrea and Somalia to keep them in the Italian Empire. In Gaddafi’s wake, slowly but surely more Libyans were allowed into the upper echelons of their country’s administration until in 1983 the then 41 year-old Gaddafi was elected the first Governor-General with native origins. It must be said that this occurred in the post-fascist era. Gaddafi later became Minister of Oil in 1991, after serving two terms as Governor-General at the head of the Muslim Association of the Lictor (keeping the Muslim branch of the PNF in charge after the PNF had already lost power in Italy).
In the meantime, the only serious threat to Italy’s position was a popular uprising in Ethiopia against the puppet regime headed by Emperor Amha Selassie. His regime was corrupt, amassing tonnes of wealth for the Italian community and the Ethiopian court and the elites collaborating with them. Protests against proceeds from gold mining disappearing into Italian pockets took off in 1965 when about a hundred miners were laid off because they had partaken in strikes for better pay and working conditions. Other industries, such as natural gas exploitation, were no different: apart from infrastructure the Italians primarily built for their own purposes, the Ethiopian people didn’t benefit. A guerrilla erupted led by the People’s Democratic Party of Ethiopia, a communist movement headed by a certain Mengistu Haile Mariam and supported by the Soviets and the Cubans. The Italians initially only supplied Ethiopian government forces with weapons, trainers and advisors, but by 1970 half the country was lost to the rebels. Ciano decided to intervene militarily, delivering heavy blows to the communists and retaking much of the country. In 1970, Italy provided 20.000 men and copious air and artillery support to Addis Ababa, and by 1972 that had tripled.
As a favour for Italian support to Cuba, President John F. Kennedy ordered the CIA to provide the Italians with intelligence. The massive intervention in Cuba had caused neo-conservatism to weaken and by the time Nixon left the White House in 1969 it was dying. Kennedy issued a policy of Cubanization of the conflict, gradually decreasing troop strengths and leaving the country altogether by 1972, just in time for the Presidential elections that year. Since he had kept his 1968 election promise of extracting the US from the Cuban conflict, JFK was re-elected in 1972, but the Democrats lost the White House to Reagan in the close run 1976 elections, which was the last hiccup of neo-conservatism. In the meantime, John F. Kennedy suffered from stomach, colon and prostrate issues, abscesses, high cholesterol and adrenal problems and in 1983 he died of a heart-attack, aged 66. His brother Robert F. Kennedy defeated Reagan in 1980 and was re-elected in 1984, after which he stayed in Congress until his retirement in 2000. The 90 year-old RFK occasionally still acts as a spokesperson for the Democrats.
Cuba, in the meantime, saw generous weapons sales by the US and the anti-communist San Remo Pact powers. Fulgencio Batista started a strong anti-corruption campaign and even became an observant member of the San Remo Pact to demonstrate that he was not an American puppet, like his opponents said he was. Batista used Italian money for popular policies to uplift the poor, thus taking away the communist support base. Drug lords (in part Colombians and Peruvians trafficking through Cuba) proved a tougher nut to crack, violently resisting attempts to shut down their operations. The government responded with 1.000 arrests in six months, using tactics like kidnapping criminals’ families to force them to come out of hiding and turn themselves in. In 1975 the Cuban Revolution finally ended with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in custody.
Besides Italy, the white minority regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia also helped Ethiopia. They returned the favour of generous Italian weapons deliveries and trainers to the State of Katanga, the mineral rich province that had seceded from Congo in 1963. They supported the Ethiopian Empire and, by extension, Italy. Rome taking sides in this post-colonial conflict allowed Katanga to repulse efforts by Congo, now led by the kleptocratic military dictatorship of Mobutu, to subjugate it. After his defeat in Katanga the unpopular and discredited Mobutu banana republic faced a Maoist insurgency led by Pierre Mulele, who in 1972 chased him out of the country and established the halfway competent People’s Republic of Congo. After Mulele’s death in 1989 the country imitated Chinese economic reforms and, with a GDP per capita of $1.100 and 7% economic growth is doing alright by African standards. Katanga, however, has been doing great with a GDP per capita of $16.000, making it one of the most affluent countries of sub-Saharan Africa. For a long time Katanga, outside the white minority regimes in Pretoria and Salisbury, was the only sub-Saharan African country that Rome had friendly relations with. All African countries spurned Italy because it held on to its empire and it had relations with only five countries: obviously the neo-colonial powers of Portugal and Spain, secondly Apartheid South Africa as well as white ruled Rhodesia, and lastly one black majority country namely the State of Katanga. Other African countries couldn’t ignore Italy since it was one of the six permanent members of the UN Security Council as well as a nuclear power, but they definitely tried. Italian embassies and consulates in African states were generally located in locations off the beaten track, and during the late 1960s and the 1970s they were the location of protests against the “Ethiopian War.”
.Chapter XVII: The Portuguese Colonial War, Italian Colonial Reform and Neo-colonial Conflict, 1962-1973.
In 1961, in the meantime, an uprising had started in Angola against Portuguese rule, which was the natural product of a wave of civil disobedience that had begun in 1948. In January 1961 there’d been a peasant revolt at Baixa de Cassanje with the peasants demanding better pay and improvement to their working conditions. The Portuguese military responded to the rebellion by bombing villages in the area with napalm, killing anywhere between 400 and 7.000 indigenous Africans. In February, about fifty militants stormed a police station and Sao Paolo prison, killing seven policemen while forty militants died and no prisoners were freed. The UPA (later known as the FNLA) and the MPLA fought the Portuguese as well as each other, with all sides committing atrocities, and in the first year of the war up to 30.000 Angolans were killed by Portuguese forces. The UPA kicked off the war by massacring 1.000 white and 6.000 black civilians, but they were soon driven out of the country into Zaire. From there the UPA continued its attacks, creating more refugees and more terror among local communities. The violence became so terrible that the UN Security Council drew up Resolution 163, calling on Portugal to desist from repressive measures against the Angolan people. Italy vetoed this resolution, arguing that Portuguese colonial rule was the only thing preventing communist revolution, and drew the ire of the Soviets in doing so.
The MPLA received support from the USSR, East Germany and Cuba while Italy supplied Portugal with all the modern weapons, ammunition, fuel and “military advisors” it needed. The white minority regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa also supported Portugal, fearing the effects of an independent Angola on their own black majority population. The other San Remo Pact powers provided some weapons and financial support as well, but didn’t provide military support of their own. In the meantime, the supposed military advisors Italy sent were in fact two elite regiments of Bersaglieri and two squadrons of fighter-bombers. They did little advising and a lot of fighting. In terms of firepower the Portuguese military was superior, but of course there’s more to a guerrilla war than just that. A new group called UNITA broke off from the FNLA in 1966 and twice derailed a train transporting Zambian copper through Angola, prompting Zambia to kick them out. UNITA leader Savimbi secretly entered Angola through Zambia and worked with the Portuguese military against the MPLA.
At the annual summit Ciano flat-out told Portuguese Prime Minister Caetano that Italy wouldn’t support the Portuguese effort forever, most certainly not if Portugal would continue to refuse to improve the living standards of its colonial subjects. Ciano heavily pressured him to do so, threatening to withdraw his troops. In 1965, therefore, Caetano therefore passed a revolutionary colonial act that initiated a ten-year plan to uplift the indigenous Africans and integrate Angola as a true overseas province of the Lusotropical Empire. He largely imitated Italian assimilatory policies, moving away from separation and segregation. To enlist local support, the Portuguese army started to promote indigenous soldiers to positions of command, initially only to junior ranks up to sergeant-major but by 1970 also middle ranks up to major and (more rarely) lieutenant-colonel. In other words, Angolans had the opportunity to rise up in the ranks to the point of commanding a battalion.
Besides that, after 500 years of colonial rule, Portugal had failed to produce any native black governors, mayors, headmasters, police inspectors, or professors due to racist policies that had denied Angolans equal and adequate education. In the decade after 1965, hundreds of elementary schools, thirty vocational schools, two dozen secondary schools, one military academy and one university were founded. From the late 1960s, blacks could not only have a military career but could also rise in the colonial administration. By the early 1970s there were several thousand black civil servants, varying from office clerks to teachers and policemen. 1974 would see the first black mayor. Inspired by the Italians, the Portuguese also built villages for loyal soldiers and black civil servants and each had its own church, elementary school, library, small hospital, sport grounds and a small cinema or theatre. The intensity of the guerrilla weakened, especially after 1970 when Africans were officially granted legal equality with whites. In keeping with Portugal’s supposed tradition of miscegenation laws were passed that forbade discrimination of interracial couples.
Italy’s own colonies remained quiet for most of the 1960s because Italian rule remained fairly popular due to its assimilatory policies. In 1962, there was a brief border war with Chad, which had gained its independence from France two years prior: though the Aouzou Strip had been signed over to Italy in the 1935 Franco-Italian Agreement, both parties had failed to ratify the agreement; despite this the newer border was conventionally assumed to be the southern frontier of Italian Libya. Chad’s first President François Tombalbaye had established an autocratic one-party dictatorship marked with insensitive mismanagement that exacerbated interethnic tensions. He tried to rally support, particularly Muslim support, by portraying Italy as a foreign bogeyman because it illegally occupied the north of the country, inhabited predominantly by Muslims. A few incursions into the Aouzou Strip took place, and the Chadians already noticed that the local populace had little interested in being “liberated” by them. The Regia Aeronautica and Italian armour responded to these incursions by obliterating the intruding Chadian armed forces. Tombalbaye was deposed and sentenced to house arrest by a moderately pro-French regime which recognized the Aouzou Strip as part of Italian Libya. That way France and Italy both got what they wanted: Italy kept the disputed territory while Chad would keep looking to its former colonizer for protection for the foreseeable future.
By the early 1970s, however, some dissent started to develop in Libya. Italian policies to integrate and assimilate its colonial subjects, to give them legal equality and to provide a high standard of living had ensured the popularity of their rule from the 1930s onward. The Libyans, however, still weren’t very involved in the administration of their country. Sure, the colonial state and the army provided career opportunities and socioeconomic advancement, but the higher up positions were still de facto reserved for Italians. There weren’t many native mayors, provincial governors were all Italian and no Libyans were to be found in the senior staff of the Governor-General’s office in Tripoli. Educated Libyans felt that if they, as Italian Muslim Arabs, were legally equal to citizens from Italian origins then they should also have an equal say in how Libya was governed.
One of these educated Libyans was Muammar Gaddafi, born in 1942 in a tent near the coastal city of Sirte, and he was illustrative of Libya’s transition from a society of nomads and farmers to an urban, sedentary middle class society. He was born into an un-influential tribal group known as the Qadhadhfa, who were Arabized Berber in heritage, to parents who earned a meagre subsistence as goat and camel herders. Determined to raise his standard of living and encouraged by the token tuition fees of Italian vocational schools Muammar’s father Abu Meniar Gaddafi learned the trade of bench mechanic. Initially this supplemented his income, but when he got a fulltime job in Sirte in his trade it supplanted his herder existence and he sold most of his goats and camels. Muammar, in the meantime, went to one of the government elementary schools and proved remarkably intelligent, passing through six grades in four years and learning to speak Italian fluently. Simultaneously he was enrolled in the Arab Lictor Youth, the youth branch of the Muslim Association of the Lictor (in turn the Muslim branch of the National Fascist Party). Gaddafi then enrolled in Sirte’s secondary school and was noticed by his teachers for his high grades and his popularity with his fellow students. Exceptionally, his principal wrote a letter of commendation to the education department of the Governor-General’s office.
This ensured that the now 17 year-old Gaddafi, part of a small select group of young Libyans, was allowed to enrol in the Sapienza University of Rome in 1959. His chosen area of study was philosophy and he was educated in the thought of many Western philosophers, scientists, political theorists, economists and sociologists: Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Gustave Le Bon, Georges Sorel and Vilfredo Pareto. He took notes from all of them. In October 1962 he witnessed Mussolini’s speech on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the March on Rome and was inspired to acquire oratory skills of his own, taking acting lessons. In the meantime, in 1963, the now 21 year-old Gaddafi completed a 77 page master paper titled “Sorel’s Social Myth and Violence coupled with Pareto’s Elite Concept.” In his paper he elaborated on how the elites defined by Pareto could use a combination of force and social myth to break the cycle of taking risks, running into catastrophe, becoming weak and humanitarian, and ultimately being replaced by new elites. In his paper he also elaborated on Marxism and called it an ideology that was “admirably idealistic, but realistically impractical” and said that historical materialism “ignores the intervention of exceptional individuals from Hannibal to Napoleon Bonaparte.” His professors considered it good enough to help him publish it as an article.
In 1963 Gaddafi returned home, but despite his education couldn’t get a better job than manager of the mailroom of Sirte’s social office and substitute teacher. From the mid 60s he started to feel disgruntled and disenfranchised and jotted down his thoughts in a diary that he started to keep. He noted that an Italian with similar academic achievements would have had a well-paid, prestigious job by age 25. In 1970, the 28 year-old Gaddafi still was a glorified office clerk and also worked as a substitute teacher in philosophy at a secondary school. Frustrated as he was, he started to give speeches wherever educated Libyans congregated. All of them boiled down to this: the Italian rulers said one thing but did another when they said that Libyans were citizens with equal rights; if Italians could get high government positions, then why couldn’t Libyans? In 1971 he formed the “Philosophy Discussion Group of Sirte” which was a front Gaddafi used to give “lectures” across the country in which he encouraged Libyans to protest against unfair treatment. Everywhere he went he got signatures for a petition, which he mailed to Governor-General Giorgio Almirante in 1972, by which time he had gathered tens of thousands of signatures. When no response was given Gaddafi encouraged a campaign of non-violent resistance, upon which Almirante ordered the OVRA to arrest him and charge him with disturbing the peace. Rioting erupted, particularly in Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte, even though the sentence was likely to be a gag order and a few months in jail or, very possibly, internal exile somewhere in the Italian Empire.
With ongoing and growing civil unrest Ciano started to fear the possibility of a full-blown colonial war like the one Portugal was fighting (although serious reforms had weakened the support for the anti-Portuguese resistance, soaking off moderates to the colonial regime). A colonial war would endanger many Italian lives since by the early 70s about 35% of Libya’s population was ethnically Italian. Also, by now, there was a sizeable Libyan community in parts of Italy that could be cultivated by anti-Italian opposition. Ciano didn’t have any interest in a colonial war nor did he have an interest in terrorist attacks in Italy itself, both of which France had seen in its conflict in Algeria. Under pressure from Rome, the court in Tripoli declared Gaddafi not guilty and ordered his immediate release. Since he was officially still a member of the Muslim Association of the Lictor, the Muslim branch of the National Fascist Party, a party and state career was still possible (in fact, party membership was a de facto requirement for a serious career). In a radical move, Gaddafi was appointed governor of Misurata Province, in which Sirte was located, becoming the first provincial governor of Libyan origins. Libya was pacified and slowly but surely similar reforms were undertaken in Albania, Eritrea and Somalia to keep them in the Italian Empire. In Gaddafi’s wake, slowly but surely more Libyans were allowed into the upper echelons of their country’s administration until in 1983 the then 41 year-old Gaddafi was elected the first Governor-General with native origins. It must be said that this occurred in the post-fascist era. Gaddafi later became Minister of Oil in 1991, after serving two terms as Governor-General at the head of the Muslim Association of the Lictor (keeping the Muslim branch of the PNF in charge after the PNF had already lost power in Italy).
In the meantime, the only serious threat to Italy’s position was a popular uprising in Ethiopia against the puppet regime headed by Emperor Amha Selassie. His regime was corrupt, amassing tonnes of wealth for the Italian community and the Ethiopian court and the elites collaborating with them. Protests against proceeds from gold mining disappearing into Italian pockets took off in 1965 when about a hundred miners were laid off because they had partaken in strikes for better pay and working conditions. Other industries, such as natural gas exploitation, were no different: apart from infrastructure the Italians primarily built for their own purposes, the Ethiopian people didn’t benefit. A guerrilla erupted led by the People’s Democratic Party of Ethiopia, a communist movement headed by a certain Mengistu Haile Mariam and supported by the Soviets and the Cubans. The Italians initially only supplied Ethiopian government forces with weapons, trainers and advisors, but by 1970 half the country was lost to the rebels. Ciano decided to intervene militarily, delivering heavy blows to the communists and retaking much of the country. In 1970, Italy provided 20.000 men and copious air and artillery support to Addis Ababa, and by 1972 that had tripled.
As a favour for Italian support to Cuba, President John F. Kennedy ordered the CIA to provide the Italians with intelligence. The massive intervention in Cuba had caused neo-conservatism to weaken and by the time Nixon left the White House in 1969 it was dying. Kennedy issued a policy of Cubanization of the conflict, gradually decreasing troop strengths and leaving the country altogether by 1972, just in time for the Presidential elections that year. Since he had kept his 1968 election promise of extracting the US from the Cuban conflict, JFK was re-elected in 1972, but the Democrats lost the White House to Reagan in the close run 1976 elections, which was the last hiccup of neo-conservatism. In the meantime, John F. Kennedy suffered from stomach, colon and prostrate issues, abscesses, high cholesterol and adrenal problems and in 1983 he died of a heart-attack, aged 66. His brother Robert F. Kennedy defeated Reagan in 1980 and was re-elected in 1984, after which he stayed in Congress until his retirement in 2000. The 90 year-old RFK occasionally still acts as a spokesperson for the Democrats.
Cuba, in the meantime, saw generous weapons sales by the US and the anti-communist San Remo Pact powers. Fulgencio Batista started a strong anti-corruption campaign and even became an observant member of the San Remo Pact to demonstrate that he was not an American puppet, like his opponents said he was. Batista used Italian money for popular policies to uplift the poor, thus taking away the communist support base. Drug lords (in part Colombians and Peruvians trafficking through Cuba) proved a tougher nut to crack, violently resisting attempts to shut down their operations. The government responded with 1.000 arrests in six months, using tactics like kidnapping criminals’ families to force them to come out of hiding and turn themselves in. In 1975 the Cuban Revolution finally ended with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in custody.
Besides Italy, the white minority regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia also helped Ethiopia. They returned the favour of generous Italian weapons deliveries and trainers to the State of Katanga, the mineral rich province that had seceded from Congo in 1963. They supported the Ethiopian Empire and, by extension, Italy. Rome taking sides in this post-colonial conflict allowed Katanga to repulse efforts by Congo, now led by the kleptocratic military dictatorship of Mobutu, to subjugate it. After his defeat in Katanga the unpopular and discredited Mobutu banana republic faced a Maoist insurgency led by Pierre Mulele, who in 1972 chased him out of the country and established the halfway competent People’s Republic of Congo. After Mulele’s death in 1989 the country imitated Chinese economic reforms and, with a GDP per capita of $1.100 and 7% economic growth is doing alright by African standards. Katanga, however, has been doing great with a GDP per capita of $16.000, making it one of the most affluent countries of sub-Saharan Africa. For a long time Katanga, outside the white minority regimes in Pretoria and Salisbury, was the only sub-Saharan African country that Rome had friendly relations with. All African countries spurned Italy because it held on to its empire and it had relations with only five countries: obviously the neo-colonial powers of Portugal and Spain, secondly Apartheid South Africa as well as white ruled Rhodesia, and lastly one black majority country namely the State of Katanga. Other African countries couldn’t ignore Italy since it was one of the six permanent members of the UN Security Council as well as a nuclear power, but they definitely tried. Italian embassies and consulates in African states were generally located in locations off the beaten track, and during the late 1960s and the 1970s they were the location of protests against the “Ethiopian War.”
- Onkel Willie
- Word Count: 3.1k