Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on July 21, 2017
The Eritrean Orthodox Patriarch, detained at home since 2007, has been allowed to attend a church service for the first time since his arrest – but supporters say in spite of this there has been no reconciliation with the regime.
Patriarch Abune Antonios was arrested and deposed by the repressive Eritrean regime after he criticised its human rights record and refused to allow it to interfere in Church affairs. The government installed another patriarch who was not recognised by the wider Orthodox Church, but he died in 2015.
Antonios, now aged 90, was allowed to take part in the mass at St Mary’s Cathedral in the capital, Asmara, but local sources told Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) that he was surrounded by guards and that plain-clothes policeman dissuaded the congregation from taking pictures.
According to CSW, the patriarch’s appearanced followed the publication on the website of the Eritrean Orthodox Church of a letter from its Holy Synod saying the rift caused by his removal from office was over. It published a picture of a ‘reconciliation committee’ comprising the ‘Union of the Monasteries and Church Scholars’, who had participated in a process that had allegedly ended in ‘full reconciliation’.
At the service on Sunday a statement from the reconciliation committee was read. However, Antonios himself has yet to speak out and has previously categorically denied the charges against him.
“How a Christian country as Italy could undertake such a hideous terror action of occupation on another peaceful Christian country that is Ethiopia.“
The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame. By Ian Campbell. Hurst; 478 pages; £30. To be published in America by Oxford University Press in August.
NEAR the village of Affile, on a picturesque hillside east of Rome, stands a monument, unveiled in 2012 and built with public funds, to Rodolfo Graziani, one of Mussolini’s most brilliant generals. He was a key figure in Italy’s brutal campaigns in Africa in the decade before the second world war.
Inside a roundabout in Addis Ababa lies another monument. This giant obelisk, perhaps the Ethiopian capital’s finest piece of public art, was donated by Josip Tito, then president of Yugoslavia, in 1955. Six bronze reliefs depict a massacre, the worst in Ethiopian history, carried out by Italian forces during the occupation of 1936-41 while Graziani was viceroy of Italy’s new colony. According to the Ethiopian government, some 30,000 Ethiopians died during the campaign of terror in February 1937.
Official Italian estimates usually number between 600 and 2,000, but they are certainly much too low. The most plausible figure, argues Ian Campbell in the first comprehensive account of the massacre, may be 20,000. In Italy Graziani’s great crime is seen as little more than a typical European colonial atrocity—no worse than the British at Amritsar, for instance, where 1,000 people (according to India’s count) were slaughtered in 1919.
But, as Mr Campbell’s meticulous work makes plain, this was no typical colonial atrocity. After a failed attempt on Graziani’s life, the Italians’ bloody revenge lasted three days. Led by the local “Blackshirts”—Mussolini’s paramilitaries, officially granted carta bianca—regular soldiers, carabinieri and perhaps more than half of Addis Ababa’s Italian civilians took part. In this ghoulish massacre, witnesses reported crushed babies, disembowelled pregnant women and the burning of entire families.
Mr Campbell argues that this was a methodical effort to wipe out Ethiopian resistance to Italian rule, more like later Nazi war crimes than earlier colonial massacres. He charges both Graziani and the local Fascist Party leader, Guido Cortese, with personal responsibility. Though unconscious when the killing began, Graziani took control of the subsequent reprisal executions, aimed in particular at eliminating the Ethiopian nobility and intelligentsia.
Graziani was never prosecuted for crimes in Africa, though he was convicted for collaboration with the Nazis and briefly imprisoned. Britain, wary of setting awkward precedents, played an outsized role in sheltering Italians with blood on their hands. Mr Campbell cites a telegram written by Winston Churchill to his ambassador in Rome in 1944, instructing him to protect Marshal Badoglio, Italian commander of the Ethiopian northern front, who used poison gas, and is considered the top war criminal by Ethiopia.
Italy was never forced to reckon with Fascism as Germany was with Nazism. Few post-war Italian historians ever tackled the massacre. Those that did were often denounced as unpatriotic. Angelo Del Boca, writing in the 1960s, was accused by the Italian army of being a “liar” for his research on Graziani’s crimes. When “Lion of the Desert”—a film depicting his actions in Libya—was released in 1981, it was soon banned, for damaging the honour of the Italian army. To this day Italian schoolchildren are not taught about the Addis Ababa massacre. Graziani is little known; his sins even less so. Mr Campbell’s book will be welcomed by the Ethiopian government, which has long argued that its citizens deserve an apology.
This article appeared in the Books and arts section of the print edition under the headline “Hearing their cries”
The above video from 1935 was filmed by the BBC (who allowed them to film? How was that possible?) In the first part, we see Italian troops and cannons lined up as a Catholic priest performs a blessing for all the troops before they head out to massacre Ethiopians. “Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus,” said the priest (holy, holy, holy). But there was nothing holy about the evil actions of the Italians.
In the second part we see Italian airstrikes upon Ethiopian villagers and even a Red Cross camp that was protecting children who’s parents were either dead or fighting the Italians. The children are trained to run into dug bunkers in the ground as soon as they hear the sound of a plane. They were hiding to avoid getting hit by bombs. People, homes and farming land were all hit.
The Vatican should issue an apology for endorsing these and many other acts of unspeakable horror against the people of Ethiopia.
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