ROME (AFP) – Italy’s government is eyeing Africa in pursuit of energy security, even as some officials defend Rome’s often-bloody colonial past on the continent -- giving short shrift to historical accuracy.
Historians agree that hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed under Italian colonial rule in Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea and what is now Somalia from the late 19th century to the first half of the 20th.
Yet Italy’s deputy foreign minister, Edmondo Cirielli, said in June that the country’s presence on the continent was “civilizing”, without bloodshed or repression.
“Whether before or during Fascism... (Italy) in Africa built and created a civilizing culture” in its colonies, said Cirielli, a member of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s post-Fascist Brothers of Italy party, borrowing the “good colonizers” myth popular on the far right.
“Our ancient and thousand-year-old culture does not make us a people of pirates who go around plundering the world,” Cirielli said, in comments that raised eyebrows among historians and the left-wing opposition.
Unlike Germany reconciling with its Nazi past or France with its occupation of Algeria, Italy has been slow to embark on public soul-searching about its colonial history.
But opposition lawmakers have now drafted a bill to establish a “Day of Remembrance for the victims of Italian colonialism” in the four African countries.
The suggested date is February 19, which marks the start of a massacre of Ethiopian civilians by Italian troops in Addis Ababa in 1937.
“Other countries such as Belgium and Germany have apologized for the crimes of colonialism,” said Laura Boldrini, an MP for the centre-left Democratic Party who co-authored the bill.
“In Italy, we tend to deny and tell ourselves that ‘Italy, good people’ built roads, hospitals and schools,” she said.
Boldrini, a former head of the lower house of parliament, said right-wing newspapers had written disparaging articles about the text, “and this government does not take colonial crimes seriously”.
The bill has little chance of being adopted given the opposition of Meloni’s coalition, which has a parliamentary majority.
Alessandro Pes, a professor of contemporary history at the University of Cagliari, said the “stereotype of the ‘good colonizer’ has no significant historical foundation”.
Rather, that rhetoric “hid a desire for colonial expansion carried out through the use of violence and the forced subordination of colonized populations”, Pes told AFP.