This accompanies Giorgia Priorelli’s Contemporary European History article Fascist Repression in the Italian ‘Fourth Shore’: The Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State in Libya

Fighting the enemies of Fascist Italy was a major concern for Benito Mussolini’s regime not only within the peninsular borders but also within the colonial administration. This was especially true in the colonial territories that constitute present-day Libya at the time of Fascist rule, where the Duce government established a branch of the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State based in Rome, having an analogous composition and goal. The Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State in Libya, which constituted a unicum among all the Italian imperial domains, acted as the judicial arm of Fascism in the colony. It aimed at shattering local resistance, spreading Fascist doctrine in the empire and imposing a cultural and racial hierarchy over Tripolitania and Cyrenaica based on the alleged supremacy of the Fascist civilization.

The case of ten illiterate Libyan peasants and shepherds between thirty and fifty years old, who were tried by the Special Tribunal in Tripoli in August 1928 for insurrection against the powers of the Fascist state, is emblematic. These defendants were accused of having escaped from the penitentiary where they had been imprisoned to reach the Libyan resistance that was fighting the Italian troops in the Gebel plateau, in northern Cyrenaica. In doing so, according to the court, they had endangered ‘public tranquillity and order’ and disturbed the colonial subjects who had already accepted the Fascist administration ‘willingly’. The judges of the Special Tribunal for State Defense recognised that these defendants had carried out their criminal conduct without ‘deplorable consequences for lack of support and aid among the peaceful subjugated populations’. Yet, the Fascist court attributed to them the ‘well-determined aim of depriving the Italian nation of its sovereignty over Libya’ to ‘raise the inhabitants of the colony in arms against the powers of the colony itself and, therefore, against the Italian state’. These charges cost them the infamous label of ‘anti-nationals’, as to say enemies of the Italian Fascist nation, which implied the death penalty by hanging to five among the individuals tried for their extreme dangerousness and thirty years of imprisonment to each of the remaining defendants. In imposing this sentence, the Special Tribunal in Libya aimed at breaking the ties of assistance that bound the local population to the guerrilla fighters, thus allowing the repressive Fascist machine to crush the local resistance from its base.

Fascist colonial justice did not spare women, who were variously tried for illegal possession of weapons, espionage, aiding an insurrection against state institutions, calumny, vilification of the Italian nation and offence to the honour of the head of the Italian government. Out of seven female defendants who sat in the dock before the colonial Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State between 1927 and 1942, the only one to be condemned was the Libyan Angelina Gabso, who was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison. This was the exemplary punishment she was given for spreading ‘false, exaggerated and biased’ political and military information with the purpose of ‘raising public alarm and depressing the public spirit’. Nonetheless, an additional element contributed to such a harsh sentence. Gasbo was also found guilty of another crime that the Fascist court deemed severely outrageous: she had called the Duce a ‘cuckold’ and named her dog ‘Mussolini’.

Fascist Repression in the Italian ‘Fourth Shore’: The Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State in Libya by Giorgia Priorelli

Main image: Administrative subdivision of Italian Libya, from “Atlantino storico” (1938). Source Wikimedia Commons