I

In 1938, the most important Italian association for tourism released the first guide to ‘Africa Orientale Italiana’ (AOI, Italian East Africa), the official name for Italy’s colonial possessions in the Horn of Africa. The guide devoted a couple of pages to Lake Tana located in north-western Ethiopia, a body of water covering an area of around 4,000 km² and constituting the source of the Blue Nile River. The author of the guide referred to the lake as a natural resource to be fruitfully exploited. The most feasible plan to be carried out in the short term was to use the water from Lake Tana to produce hydroelectric power and develop extensive farming.Footnote ¹ This would have implied constructing an integrated system of canals, power plants, barrages, and irrigation arrangements, in line with many other schemes aimed to transform arid lands in Africa and worldwide.Footnote ² However, the project never got beyond the planning stage. Three years later, in the middle of the war, the British army gained control over Ethiopia and thus brought to the end Italy’s short-lived, disputed colonial rule of the country.

Almost fifty years later, Ethiopian representatives of the DERG (the Provisional Military Administrative Council – a military junta led by Mengistu Haile Mariam) asked the Italian government to help fund a scheme very similar to the project foreseen in the 1938 guidebook.Footnote ³ According to the official request sent to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in August 1985, the scheme was designed to counteract the effects of famine in Ethiopia. Four months earlier, the Ethiopian authorities had appointed the Italian engineering firm Studio Pietrangeli to carry out a preliminary assessment, and had proposed that the company Salini Costruzioni be responsible for the project’s implementation.Footnote ⁴ Both Pietrangeli and Salini had already been in Ethiopia for at least twenty years, where they were in charge of infrastructural works. Both were among the major Italian companies, and both enjoyed a very good relationship with Italy’s ruling political class. The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs generously funded the project within the framework of an emergency programme aiming to ‘defeat hunger in the world’, launched in 1985.Footnote ⁵ The project was named Tana-Beles since the water drained from Lake Tana for the production of hydroelectric power was due to then be channelled into the Beles River and used to irrigate the valley. The Tana-Beles project in particular qualified Italy as the largest single donor of non-food aid to Ethiopia during the period between 1984 and 1986.Footnote ⁶

In 1987, the Italian emergency programme – designed as a temporary measure – expired, but the ambitious Tana-Beles project was far from having been completed. Ethiopian political events also affected its development. In 1991, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) overthrew the DERG and seized power; nevertheless, it demanded that the Italian government continue the work that had been started under the agreement with the previous regime. The Tana-Beles project received additional funding, it was reduced in scope, and although it was born as an emergency response to famine, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs re-labelled it as a ‘development work’.Footnote ⁷ In 1994, the Italian Ministry officially stated the end of the project.

This article seeks to contribute to the multifaceted history of postcolonial humanitarianism, that is, the history of international aid policies, programmes, and practices after the end of formal colonial empires.Footnote ⁸ In so doing, it connects to a recent strand of research that has looked at infrastructures and the management of water as a cornerstone of African states’ development and modernization plans. Most of these studies have analysed national and international discourses on scientific and technological progress and the implementation of individual large projects, assessing their effective (or missed) achievements.Footnote ⁹ The aim of this article is rather to explore the making of humanitarianism as a complex process, which drew on colonial experiences but transcended the geographical confines of former empires. Although the Tana-Beles project, according to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was largely unsuccessful because it failed to relieve the plight of Ethiopians hit by the famine, this case-study serves very well the purpose for at least two reasons: it unveils the profound connections between colonial and postcolonial periods, and it brings to the fore the interplay between the various actors which shaped international aid in the long run. Italian enterprises were among these actors and they played a crucial role in the development of humanitarianism in the ‘Third World’.

The long history of the Tana-Beles programme not only offers further evidence about the colonial roots of large infrastructural works undertaken by independent states in postcolonial age.Footnote ¹⁰ It also shows us the links between colonial policies aimed at boosting the Ethiopian economy and Italian post-war aid schemes, and how these contributed to shape the response of Italy to the famine in the mid-1980s. Furthermore, provisions of the late 1930s for building infrastructures favoured the penetration of Italian companies in Ethiopia, which in the following decades were to play a key role in planning and implementing large construction works in the country, hydroelectric plants and irrigation systems at Lake Tana included. International aid has been seen as the ground on which former motherlands and former colonies redefined their (economic, political, and cultural) relations,Footnote ¹¹ as well as the mere continuation of Western dominance over the newly independent states.Footnote ¹² This article takes the example of the Tana-Beles project to demonstrate that the colonial past was woven into the very fabric of international relief policies and practices developed after the collapse of formal imperial control. The approach to Ethiopian economic advancement which had distinguished Italian occupation in the 1930s re-emerged in Italy’s aid programmes implemented from the 1950s onwards, but it took on different meanings and it served distinct objectives. Postcolonial humanitarianism appears therefore as the transformation of colonial practices and relationships into new policies, which did not depend only on former metropoles but also on the interests of new independent states and on the agenda of international organizations.

From the colonial period onwards, Italian large investments in infrastructural works paved the way for national private companies to Ethiopia. The role of private business remains still largely overlooked in the history of humanitarianism, while historians have recently started to tackle the role of foreign enterprises in postcolonial states and their links with local elites in the delivery of development goals.Footnote ¹³ Bridging these two historiographies, this article contends that private companies had a prominent role in shaping postcolonial humanitarianism because they could benefit from both the favourable policies of donor countries, and the relationships they established in the long run with the authorities of recipient countries. National enterprises were crucial players first in the unfolding of Italian aid programmes for Ethiopia in post-war decades, and later in shaping the humanitarian response to the famine. Undoubtedly, Italian governamental policies favoured the overseas business of national firms, as it happened with Salini Costruzioni and Studio Pietrangeli. However, Italian companies benefited also from the familiarity with the environment and from the close relationships with Ethiopian authorities that they built and maintained in the long run, in spite of the local institutional and political changes.

The benefit was mutual, as the connections with Italian enterprises facilitated Ethiopian governments in pursuing their plans. Although with different goals, the emperor Haile Selassie, the leader of the military junta Mengistu Haile Mariam, and the EPRDF government saw the exploitation of natural resources and the management of the territory as powerful means to be deployed in the field of domestic policy and in negotiations with Western countries. The Tana-Beles project, like other aid programmes implemented in Ethiopia, was not the mere outcome of Italy’s political and economic interests in the region. It rather resulted from the interplay between Italian and Ethiopian authorities, with the recipients playing an active role in matching foreign aid programmes and their goals. Also from this point of view, the colonial age matters. In the early twentieth century, Ethiopia was itself an empire intent on expanding its possessions in the Horn of Africa, and it enjoyed good diplomatic relations with several Western countries. When the Italian invasion occurred, in 1935, the emperor Haile Selassie was granted asylum by the United Kingdom and armed resistance maintained the control of the country’s large areas. In spite of the fact that it constituted a cornerstone of the fascist imperial plan, Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia lasted only five years: after the liberation of Addis Ababa by the British army, the emperor re-entered the capital and regained the throne. Unlike other former motherlands of long-lasting colonial empires, in post-war decades Italy did not enjoy any long-established special diplomatic relations with Ethiopia. The relationship between the two countries was fluid, and Addis Ababa utilized its own room for manoeuvre while negotiating aid programmes.Footnote ¹⁴ It did so also by virtue of its connections with the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and, during the DERG years, the Soviet Union. At the same time, Italy determined its aid policies towards Ethiopia in the frame of international organizations it belonged to, as it happened with the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).Footnote ¹⁵ The DAC set specific standards for international aid and Italy, as a member, had to meet them. This article develops further the recently introduced ‘three-sided perspective’ on postcolonial humanitarianism, which connects the global context, the national donors of the former colonial power, and the internal dynamics of the recipient state.Footnote ¹⁶ The case of Italy and Ethiopia demonstrates that postcolonial international aid was moulded by the interplay of multiple actors: governments of Italy, Ethiopia, and other nation-states, private companies, and intergovernmental organizations that developed the framework of international relief.

Implemented in the name of immediate reaction against starvation, the scheme to produce hydroelectric power and to irrigate the Beles Valley stemmed from Italian long-term belief in large infrustructures as being key to the economic advancement of Ethiopia. The response to conflicts and emergencies in the ‘Third World’ has been identified as the core concern of humanitarianism’s postcolonial moment.Footnote ¹⁷ An abundance of studies have demonstrated that the famine in Ethiopia was a turning point in this sense, for several reasons: due to the support to aid-giving from all sectors of society; as a result of the powerful role of television in raising global awareness and compassion, and the engagement of pop-stars in campaigning for aid.Footnote ¹⁸ In Italy, too, humanitarian campaigns exerted a decisive pressure on institutions, whose response was exceptional in terms of resources’ mobilization yet significantly rooted in previously established schemes for development aid. The history of the Tana-Beles project enables us to re-read the response to Ethiopian famine within a larger timeframe which goes back to the colonial period, blurring the boundaries between emergency relief and assistance to development. This article argues that the connection between humanitarianism and assistance to development, currently invoked as the new frontier for managing humanitarian crisis,Footnote ¹⁹ is an integral part of the very history of international aid.

The article will begin by examining the fascist plan for infrastructures in occupied Ethiopia as the background for the very first project on the construction of hydroelectric plants and irrigation systems at Lake Tana. It will then analyse Italy’s aid programmes in Ethiopia in the decades after the Second World War and see how they favoured both the further penetration of Italian enterprises in the region, and the Ethiopian emperor’s programmes of development. Finally, the article will turn its attention to the Tana-Beles project as Italy’s main intervention to counteract the mid-1980s famine upon the request of the Ethiopian government led by Mengistu and in agreement with the Italian companies that were to be in charge of the work. In the conclusion, the article will consider the importance of this case-study for the history of postcolonial humanitarianism.

II

The Lake Tana region had been the focus of national and international interests well before the Italians arrived in Addis Ababa. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, control over Lake Tana’s water was on the table in the negotiations held between the British and Emperor Menelik II, who was intensifying Ethiopia’s relations with European countries after he had defeated the Italians in Adwa.Footnote ²⁰ In the wake of his successful resistance to a European army, Menelik aimed both at consolidating the position of his large empire in the Horn of Africa and gaining international recognition. The British authorities, in turn, were eager to control Lake Tana in order to preserve the regular flow of the Blue Nile in Sudan and its supply of water to the Nile. In 1902, Ethiopia granted England first rights to use Lake Tana as a Nile reservoir.Footnote ²¹ In the mid-1920s, Ethiopia attempted to obtain the necessary funding to build the dam at Lake Tana from the United States, as part of a broader quest for co-operation with American authorities.Footnote ²² Ten years later, Emperor Haile Selassie took advantage once again of Britain’s interest in the lake’s waters. In the spring of 1935, he promised the UK the concession for the construction of a dam at Lake Tana, while attempting to get London to help Ethiopia avert Mussolini’s attack on the country.Footnote ²³ However, diplomacy failed and war broke out a few months later. Subsequently, the Italian forces entered Addis Ababa, Haile Selassie went into exile in London, and resistance developed in large areas of Ethiopia.

Lake Tana continued to be regarded as a potentially major resource also during fascist rule. In 1937, the Italian Royal Academy organized a geographical expedition to the region.Footnote ²⁴ The hydrographical survey carried out on that occasion showed that Lake Tana only contributed very little to the quantity of water that the Blue Nile poured into the Nile.Footnote ²⁵ Thus, the largest lake in Italian East Africa could be used to irrigate land and generate hydroelectric power. The development of this ‘new’ source of energy was among the priorities of the Italian industrial plan for Ethiopia,Footnote ²⁶ in the wake of European enthusiasm for hydropower as a renewable alternative to replace coal.Footnote ²⁷

Italians’ interest in Lake Tana was based on existing knowledge of its potential as a hydric resource; but it also epitomized the fascist view of Italy’s imperial mission. The Italians looked at infrastructure as the means by which to ‘master the challenging terrain and taxing climate’ of African possessions, and they ‘staked their right to rule and global status as an imperial power’ precisely on the ability to dominate the hostile environment of the colonies.Footnote ²⁸ According to Andrew Denning, whereas other empires treated the building of infrastructure as a means to an end, ‘Italians made it their entire mission.’Footnote ²⁹ Against this backdrop, the fascist government looked at water control as essential to ‘fix’ the colonial empire.Footnote ³⁰

The outlay on infrastructure was particularly prominent in Ethiopia because the fascist government saw it as a country rich in natural resources and the flagship of Italian colonial possessions.Footnote ³¹ Though condensed in a very short period of time, the construction of roads, bridges, and water plants involved the expertise of engineers, hydrologists, and geologists; it absorbed a significant share of the government’s public spending and it engaged a large number of Italian enterprises.Footnote ³² Three years after the war against Ethiopia, 193 construction companies were already at work in AOI. Fascist policies regarding infrastructure contributed to the establishment of a larger economic market, which familiarized Italian firms with the Horn of Africa.

The project for the construction of hydroelectric plants and irrigation systems at Lake Tana, mentioned in the AOI guide, was developed within this context. Despite the fact that it fell through, it was nonetheless important since it stemmed from the overall assessment, survey, and investigative work carried out under Italian auspices. All of this work was to be recast in several national programmes drawn up and/or implemented in Ethiopia in the following decades.Footnote ³³ Therefore the return, in the mid-1980s, to the plan for Lake Tana and the Beles Valley formulated fifty years earlier came as no surprise.

After the British army defeated Italy, allied with Nazi Germany, Lake Tana once again became a key issue in the relationship between the Ethiopian authorities and the major Western powers. In May 1941, shortly after the liberation of Addis Ababa, the emperor Haile Selassie re-entered the capital and regained the throne he was subsequently to hold for a further three decades. However, only the end of the war marked the conclusion of Britain’s substantial occupation of the country, and Haile Selassie looked to a partnership with the USA as the best counterweight to stringent British control.Footnote ³⁴ Global geopolitics and the Cold War led the US government to try and expand its influence in the Horn of Africa. Furthermore, the new commitment to supporting Ethiopia was favoured by the great popularity the country had started to enjoy among Afro-Americans from the 1930s onwards.Footnote ³⁵

Washington guaranteed Addis Ababa mainly military aid, although the Four-Point Agreement signed in 1952 laid particular emphasis on the development of infrastructure, along with agricultural and public health education, public administration training, and the awarding of scholarships.Footnote ³⁶ Modernization was a priority for Haile Selassie, who saw it as both the way to adapt the country to the global system, and the means by which to entrench his own power.Footnote ³⁷ In this situation, Ethiopian and American representatives arranged for a survey of the Blue Nile Basin, including Lake Tana as a source of the river. Footnote ³⁸ The survey was meant to be the necessary precondition for a general plan for the production of hydroelectric power. The Ethiopian–American scheme for the Blue Nile and Lake Tana raised considerable concern among the British,Footnote ³⁹ but it also implied new negotiations with Italy, because of the cartographic surveys carried out during the colonial period. The Americans requested these surveys in order to complete their work, while the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarded all the information in its possession as a possible asset for the national companies looking at Ethiopia as a potential market for their services.Footnote ⁴⁰ Knowledge was a valuable legacy of the previous fascist empire, and one that the Italian Republic aimed to exploit in its attempt to re-launch the nation’s economy following the war.

Yet, the issue of the cartographic surveys was a thorny problem for Italy, due to tense diplomatic relations with Ethiopia as a result of past aggressions; and also as a result of Italy’s attempt to retain indirect control of the area by supporting Eritrean independence.Footnote ⁴¹ Furthermore, at the time the two countries were meant to negotiate the exact position of the Ethiopian–Somali border, as established by the United Nations’ agreement granting Italy powers as trustee of Somalia. They failed to do so, however, and the question was submitted to the UN in the mid-1950s, when diplomatic tensions started to ease.Footnote ⁴² The understanding reached in 1956, when Addis Ababa and Rome agreed on the reparations that Italy had to pay because of the 1935 invasion, was therefore entrenched in the complex Italian decolonization process in Africa;Footnote ⁴³ at the same time, it paved the way for aid policies that Italy was to develop in the following years. According to the agreement, Ethiopia was to invest the approximately 16 million dollars it had received from the Italian government in the construction of a cotton factory in Bahar Dar, and of a dam and a hydroelectric power plant at Koka on the Awash River.Footnote ⁴⁴

The imperial government was supposed to entrust Italian companies with both works; thus, Italian enterprises were offered the opportunity to expand their presence in Ethiopia and their relationship with local authorities. The dam built in Koka was the most important in the country, and Impresit – the company in charge of the construction – participated in many other infrastructural works.Footnote ⁴⁵ Furthermore, engagement in Ethiopia was part of Impresit’s involvement in the ‘Third World’ market for major construction projects: in 1956, this Italian corporation signed the contract for the construction of the Kariba dam, on behalf of the Central African Federation.Footnote ⁴⁶ It was a crucial step towards the Italian construction companies’ global expansion, which was to emerge from transnational connections resulting from the entanglement of decolonization and post-empire international aid.Footnote ⁴⁷

III

The unusual form of payment for reparations that Italy and Ethiopia agreed upon in 1956 was perfectly in line with the international aid policies established by the Italian government a few years later. Italy moderately contributed to a number of multilateral programmes sponsored by international organizations, but its membership of the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD contributed to shape the country’s aid policies. Since its foundation in 1963, the DAC not only set standards for development aid and the amounts that industrialized countries were supposed to give, but it also introduced a review process aimed at evaluating, for example, the volume of aid, its geographical distribution, and the principal capital exporters for each member state.Footnote ⁴⁸

For at least twenty years, the Italian authorities’ aim was to keep a balance between the price that Italy was to pay for membership of the ‘club of the rich’,Footnote ⁴⁹ and the furthering of national interests. Membership of the DAC entitled Italy to participate in the drawing up of European policies relating to ‘underdeveloped countries’, and it strengthened its position among Western powers. At the same time, the government regarded the fragilities and contradictions of national post-war economic growth as a limitation on large-scale investment in international development programmes, and looked for solutions best suited to Italian circumstances. Hence, it devoted most of the budget for international aid to financial co-operation, whereby Italian enterprises willing to expand their business in the ‘Third World’ were offered financial support. Newly independent states enjoyed facilities for the importation of Italian goods, and also benefited from advantageous credit terms in regard to works (mainly industrial plants and infrastructures) carried out by Italian firms.Footnote ⁵⁰

This approach shaped Italy’s relationship with the Horn of Africa, which enjoyed a privileged position in regard to Italian aid, although the majority of such aid was provided to one country, Somalia.Footnote ⁵¹ Nevertheless, Italy’s financial co-operation favoured the engagement of national enterprises in Ethiopia as well. In 1963, when commenting on the agreement reached with the Italian government for a loan of 14 million dollars, Emperor Haile Selassie praised the activities of Italian companies and mentioned the construction of dams as one of their strong points.Footnote ⁵² Notwithstanding the re-emergence of diplomatic tensions between the two countries,Footnote ⁵³ Italy’s financial co-operation with Ethiopia evolved in harmony with Haile Selassie’s attitude towards the country’s development. Great infrastructural works met his need ‘to demonstrate progress without threatening the existing order’.Footnote ⁵⁴

When the emperor gave his speech, Impresit was still at work on the Awash River project, and two years later the municipality of Addis Ababa commissioned Studio Pietrangeli and Salini Costruzioni to build the Legadadi dam, which was to regulate the flow of the Akaki River and provide the capital city with drinking water. Funding was provided by a credit institute financed by the Italian state (the Istituto di Credito per le Opere Pubbliche), in the measure of 24 million dollars.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Legadadi dam was completed in 1971, and as the company’s official history states, this undertaking provided Salini with ‘a sort of diplomatic passport and a certificate of skills and efficiency’ for operating in Ethiopia.Footnote ⁵⁶

Italy’s funding of international aid was very modest compared to that of other DAC members,Footnote ⁵⁷ and the United States remained the major donor in Ethiopia until the early 1970s.Footnote ⁵⁸ Nevertheless, the decades prior to the 1980s famine are key to understanding the response to emergencies as epitomized by the Tana-Beles project. Italian economic assistance to the Ethiopian empire stemmed from several interwoven elements. On the one hand, there were the DAC’s development policies, which favoured the flow of capital toward southern countries as a way of binding them to Western economies. On the other hand, Haile Selassie’s vision of development, together with his foreign aid policies, was also of key importance. From the post-war years onwards, co-operation with the United States remained crucial to the Ethiopian emperor, although he also relied on the financial support of several other Western countries for the completion of important infrastructure.Footnote ⁵⁹ His diplomatic success in postcolonial Africa (the Organization of African Unity was funded and headquartered in Addis Ababa) undoubtedly helped him successfully diversify the sources for development schemes.Footnote ⁶⁰

The ‘diplomatic passport’ that Salini and other Italian companies gained at the time of the empire was to retain its value in subsequent years, in spite of the dramatic political and institutional changes which occurred during that period. After the revolution had seen Haile Selassie overthrown and the DERG seize power, official relations between the two countries remained frozen for a while.Footnote ⁶¹ However, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs re-launched financial co-operation with Ethiopia at the end of the 1970s. In Rome in February 1980, the Ethiopian minister of finance signed the first post-revolution agreement with a Western government. Italy guaranteed Ethiopia a loan of 15 million dollars to buy industrial equipment (in the textile and hydroelectric sectors); then in 1982 a second agreement was signed, for a further loan of 25 million dollars, to be spent on the modernization of Addis Ababa’s aqueduct system.Footnote ⁶²

New aid programmes replicated the characteristics of previous years’ schemes (easy credit terms, selection of Italian companies for supplies and construction work). However, this additional aid now acquired a different meaning which at one and the same time followed and challenged the logic of the Cold War. The Soviet Union backed post-revolutionary Ethiopia, while the United States withdrew aid to the country. Soviet support was mainly military, while the DERG kept the door open to economic co-operation with the West.Footnote ⁶³ European states filled some of the gaps left by Ethiopia’s fallout with the USA. International aid became an increasingly important part of Italian foreign policy, and Rome was in the frontline of financial co-operation with Ethiopia despite the latter country being led by a socialist military junta.Footnote ⁶⁴ Italy aimed at re-balancing the existing privileged relationship with Somalia by expanding its sphere of action to the whole Horn of Africa.Footnote ⁶⁵ At the same time, Italian companies, who were already acquainted with the Ethiopian environment, sought to strengthen their business operations in the area. The economic crisis, in their view, made governmental help with the engagement of Italian enterprises abroad even more urgent.Footnote ⁶⁶ Against the backdrop of all these changes, Italian and Ethiopian interests – in spite of their conflicting international alliances – converged, resulting among other things in the establishment of a Joint Steering Committee tasked with drafting three-year co-operation schemes.

IV

In the official request addressed to the minister of foreign affairs in August 1985, the Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia emphasized that the Tana-Beles River Basin was a priority project in counteracting the devastating effects of the famine. Studio Pietrangeli had already prepared a preliminary assessment of said project,Footnote ⁶⁷ and Salini Costruzioni was ready to do the work on the project. The letter was obviously an official document formalizing previous informal agreements and ratifying those contacts that had already been established.

Negotiations with the Italian government took place when the international response to the risk of mass starvation in Ethiopia was at its peak. In October 1984, a BBC report – immediately broadcast worldwide by a large number of other television channels – showed shocking images of sick, starving children in an overcrowded feeding centre.Footnote ⁶⁸ The exceptional visibility of the issue sent the ‘Ethiopian crisis’ to the top of the agenda of humanitarianism. Governments and intergovernmental organizations dedicated special funds and emergency programmes to it. Voluntary agencies immediately launched new campaigns to collect donations,Footnote ⁶⁹ and in June 1985 numerous shipments of supplies arrived in Ethiopia’s ports. Yet, governments, international agencies, and NGOs all had to tackle the problem of distribution. On the one hand, the civil war was unfolding precisely in the northern regions worst hit by the famine, which were therefore inaccessible. On the other hand, the Ethiopian authorities wanted to control all incoming resources, and donor countries were seriously concerned about the role aid was playing in facilitating the regime’s policies.Footnote ⁷⁰

The agreement between Ethiopia and Italy was meant to respond to the serious emergency, and took shape in the wake of global mobilization against the famine; however, at the same time it developed along the same lines as previous aid programmes. In the mid-1980, the Ethiopian government already enjoyed very good relations with both the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Italian companies operating in the country. Pietrangeli and Salini were used to working in Ethiopia. They were familiar with local institutions, and undoubtedly they could exert decisive pressure on Italian decision-makers. Furthermore, the core of the Tana-Beles project dealt with infrastructural works, which was the ‘specialty’ of Italian international aid, and this could now serve Mengistu’s plan for a socialist Ethiopia very well.

Construction of the weir on Lake Tana (where the lake discharges its waters into the Blue Nile), the canal to divert water to the Beles Valley, the hydroelectric power plant, roads, health structures, and the extensive expansion of cultivated lands were all part of Mengistu’s ongoing resettlement programme. While it was negotiating with Italian representatives, the Ethiopian regime moved people from the regions of Shoa and Wollo into the area. Italy’s investment in a large construction project allowed the government to dramatically speed up the establishment of a new settlement in the Tana region, which in turn was a cornerstone of Mengistu’s social engineering scheme.

Ethiopia was not entirely new to large-scale resettlement schemes, as such had already been attempted in the imperial age.Footnote ⁷¹ The DERG drew on previous such experiences, although its programme was much more ambitious, since massive resettlement constituted a key part of the government’s efforts to solve the ‘peasant question’. The regime looked at the cultivation of new lands, mechanization, villagization, and the extensive redistribution of the population as crucial steps towards increased agricultural production and the establishment of a well-developed agrarian society.Footnote ⁷² The plan derived from Ethiopia’s adherence to the Soviet model of development,Footnote ⁷³ although it was also regarded as the best possible response to the famine. It therefore received the greatest impetus in the mid-1980s, when the food crisis was at its peak.Footnote ⁷⁴ In Mengistu’s view, the emergency due to the famine, long-term relief, and development were all strictly interconnected, and he strove to curb international aid in order to achieve his aims. The Tana-Beles project was the first international project that openly supported his plans for resettlement and villagization, precisely at the time when non-governmental organizations such as Médicins Sans Frontières started criticizing the Ethiopian authorities for their instrumental use of international aid.Footnote ⁷⁵

On the Italian side too, the entanglement of the emergency, long-term relief, and development played a crucial role. The famine appeal in Ethiopia was rooted in a wider campaign for the mobilization of Italian institutions against hunger in the world that starting from the late 1970s had gained the attention of the media and the support of several grass-root organizations. Some pressure came also from European institutions. After much heated debate, in September 1980 the European parliament ratified a resolution requiring all member states to allocate at least 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product to development aid.Footnote ⁷⁶ One year later, 246 members of the parliament signed the Nobel Prize Winners’ Manifesto Appeal against hunger in the world.Footnote ⁷⁷

The issue was now on the Italian political agenda, with a specific emphasis on the food crisis in Africa. In 1985, the government led by the socialist Bettino Craxi issued an ad hoc law that allocated unprecedented funds to international aid. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs undersecretary, endowed with special powers, was in charge of selecting, funding, and supervising the projects designed to offer an immediate response to the risk of starvation. The ‘emergency’ label allowed special procedures to be adopted, as in the case of the Tana-Beles project: the company Salini Costruzioni was awarded the project without any public call for tender being necessary. The lack of transparency in the assignment of funds was precisely one of the main grounds for subsequent allegations of political patronage and corruption.Footnote ⁷⁸

Italian authorities, however, did not design the emergency appeal simply to circumvent the standard procedures governing the assignment of funding: the entire programme in question, aimed at ‘preventing mass deaths from hunger’, was clearly an intermingling of emergency relief (to prevent such deaths) and the pursuit of economic development in the ‘underdeveloped world’. On the one hand, it evoked the daily starvation of children, stressing the urgent need for a rapid response and entailing the shipment of rice, dried foods, and soya oil for the immediate relief of the suffering populations. On the other hand, it strongly focused on the need to support poor countries in the development of their economies and on the priority of ‘structural actions’, which mainly meant the construction of infrastructure.Footnote ⁷⁹ The Tana-Beles project was no exception to this, as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs undersecretary spent half of the total funds assigned to bilateral programmes on contracts awarded to some of Italy’s major construction companies.Footnote ⁸⁰

V

Looking at Ethiopian and Italian intentions, we can safely say that the Tana-Beles project brought together various different aims and objectives, in terms of possible immediate benefits and long-term plans, at both national and international level. Work in the Beles Valley started in March 1986. The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ undersecretary presented the programme as of an ‘integrated’ nature, aiming at local development through co-ordinated action in multiple sectors: infrastructure, education and professional training, healthcare, agriculture, and small-scale industry. Two Italian NGOs provided certain medical staff and were in charge of relief work, but the construction of infrastructure formed the majority of the project, and Salini Costruzioni together with Studio Pietrangeli were the central players.

One year after work had started, the water plant serving thirty-nine villages and a number of healthcare structures had been completed, together with the roads and the airport needed to transport the people, supplies, and machines required for implementation of the project. Deforestation had begun, and a small portion of the land had already been cultivated. The targeted 100,000 hectares remained some way off; yet the main problem was not the time needed to complete the work, but rather the limited fertility of the local soil. According to the report drafted by the Italian embassy’s agronomist in Addis Ababa, the local soil was unsuited to intensive, constant farming, since fertility was low, and it had to be preserved through carefully planned crop rotation and periods of leaving it fallow.Footnote ⁸¹ The two main consequences highlighted by this assessment were: the potential for the self-sustainment of resettled people was in doubt, and the land’s management had to be designed on the basis of the requirements of the terrain.

For the time being, Italy provided the local population with food aid;Footnote ⁸² but thereafter the 18,798 families who had already settled in the Beles Valley, and the 21,414 families due to arrive by the end of 1987, would have to be self-sufficient in food. However, due to low soil fertility, the crops grown were not enough to fully ensure self-sustainability. In the view of the Italian embassy’s expert, only long-term experimentation and analysis could lead to new farming methods capable of overcoming the problem of the soil’s low fertility. Furthermore, cropping patterns had to be carefully re-determined on the basis of the soil’s shortcomings and potential. In other words, sticking to the collective organization of work – previously introduced by the Ethiopian authorities – was detrimental to the development of agriculture in the Beles Valley.

The Italian embassy’s expert reiterated his suggestions one year later. However, revising the programme with regard to farming methods and cropping patterns was not an option.Footnote ⁸³ Studio Pietrangeli had drawn the Project Master Plan in agreement with the Ethiopian authorities, and any modification of this arrangement had to fall in line with the regime’s vision of agrarian development based substantially on large-scale mechanization, intensive cultivation, state farms, and peasant associations in charge of land management. The aims of the regime and of the Italian companies concerned converged since the DERG’s scheme entailed large-scale infrastructural works and the marketing of agricultural machinery and fertilizers. The dramatic increase in resources due to the response to the famine appeal consolidated the role that aid played in shaping relations between the African state and Italian private business.Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet, this arrangement failed to achieve self-sufficiency and indeed hindered what was supposed to be the primary objective of Italian intervention, namely the eradication of hunger through ‘structural actions’.

In spite of its shortcomings at the local level, the Tana-Beles project contributed towards strengthening Ethiopian–Italian co-operation. Italy had already further developed its international aid policies, which were now more prominent within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Footnote ⁸⁵ At the end of 1987, at a point when international efforts to fight the famine had sharply declined, Ethiopian and Italian delegations agreed upon a new country-wide programme, based on medium- and long-term plans and aimed at achieving food self-sufficiency.Footnote ⁸⁶ The memorandum of understanding also ratified the continuation of the Tana-Beles project. However, while the meeting of delegations was ongoing in Rome, the EPRDF kidnapped two Italian technicians working in the Beles Valley. In fact, Salini Costruzioni relied heavily on Italian manpower, and 250 workers had moved into the area at the beginning of the project. The armed coalition against Mengistu released the two men after forty days, but despite the security measures put in place by the Italians, the ‘rebels’ kidnapped three more people in the following seven months.Footnote ⁸⁷ Security issues slowed the programme down, and four years after it had started it was significantly reduced in scope. The main hydraulic sections of the project (the Blue Nile weir, the Tana-Beles tunnel, and the hydroelectric plant) were abandoned.

The entity of the work had been reduced, but in October 1989 Studio Pietrangeli and the Ethiopian government applied for additional funds in order to complete it.Footnote ⁸⁸ The International Co-operation and Development Department (Divisione Generale per la Cooperazione e lo Sviluppo, DGCS) of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs examined the proposal, praised the accomplishments of the project in past years, but at the same time claimed that the emergency was over and demanded a change of approach. ‘The Project – stated the DGCS – brilliantly dealt with the emergency phase by providing infrastructures and – in part – technologies needed for the intense development of the area’, but it was time to move to the ‘post-emergency phase’ and pursue sustainability: local agriculture was still far from producing enough for peasants’ sustainment.Footnote ⁸⁹ The Italian–Ethiopian Joint Steering Committee discussed the issue on several occasions and it eventually agreed on new targets for the programme, namely: strengthening the villagers’ role in the management of agricultural activities; enhancing the settlers’ standards of living; fruitfully exploiting the infrastructure built in the area. In October 1990, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs funded the new scheme and renamed it the ‘Development Project in the Beles Valley’.

A few months later, the guerrilla movement fighting the regime occupied the region and took control of project operations, while international personnel were evacuated. After overthrowing Mengistu and seizing power, the EPRDF negotiated with Italian authorities with regard to the programme’s completion, which was to fall under the responsibility of the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture. In the meantime, around 30,000 of the 80,000 people resettled in the Beles Valley returned to their places of origin.Footnote ⁹⁰ Settlers continued to leave over the following months, and in 1993 only 26,000 villagers remained.Footnote ⁹¹ The depopulation of the area exposed the original programme’s failure. Contrary to official statements, the infrastructure had not offered an adequate response to the famine, either in terms of immediate relief or as the premise for the agricultural development of the Beles Valley.

As planned, Salini Costruzioni completed the infrastructural works within the space of two years, but in doing so the company’s operations were heavily criticized due to the project’s enormous budget and the lack of transparency in its management.Footnote ⁹² In the meantime, families who remained in the Beles Valley received a portion of land (up to 0.75 ha) to grow rice, corn, and millet.Footnote ⁹³ Though already part of the 1990 agreement, the review of cropping patterns was performed in line with the EPRDF’s economic reforms – such as the privatization of public enterprises and the liberalization of trade – which facilitated Ethiopia’s relations with Western donors.Footnote ⁹⁴ During this period, those Italian NGOs involved in the Tana-Beles project assumed greater importance. In particular, they implemented a wide range of projects aimed at promoting community life and consolidating family-run enterprises. These projects concerned home gardening, the provision of microcredit facilities, grass-root management training, the development of handicrafts, and local seed production. Yet, the NGOs in question received only 7.6 per cent of total Italian funding for the 1991–4 period.Footnote ⁹⁵ In spite of the change of approach, infrastructural work continued to absorb most of the funding available.

In November 1994, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent three experts to the Beles Valley to get a final assessment of the project: the company Salini Costruzioni had left two years earlier, and the contract of the NGO that remained in the field was about to expire. The lengthy report drawn up by those experts offered a detailed description of the conditions of villagers, infrastructure, agriculture, and other economic activities. The number of settlers had further decreased to around 20,000, while cultivated land only accounted for 7,000 of the 20,000 hectares available. Agriculture was still scarcely profitable, and self-sufficiency had not been achieved. However, the development of additional activities (home gardening, handicrafts, small-scale livestock breeding) was promising, and the experts recommended that the NGO’s contract be extended. The overall evaluation of the project, which had started eight years earlier, was highly critical. The three experts underlined

The project, they concluded, ‘did not achieve the initially expected objective of self-sufficiency and sustainability’.Footnote ⁹⁶

The Tana-Beles programme failed to relieve the plight of local people and to stimulate agrarian development in order to prevent future food crises. Yet, it proved successful in strengthening the partnership between Italian companies and the Ethiopian authorities and paved the way for further infrastructural works. On behalf of the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation, Studio Pietrangeli drew up a new preliminary plan for the Tana-Beles interbasin water transfer, which was initially supposed to be included in the project sponsored by the Italian government and had been later abandoned. Starting in 2005, Salini Costruzioni built both the canal and the gigantic water plant (the second largest in the country) fed by the transfer of water from the lake to the river. The ‘Beles multi-purpose project’ was completed in 2011 and the World Bank’s major investment in the area’s water management facilitated its implementation.Footnote ⁹⁷ The new project stemmed from the plan drafted in the mid-1980s, but was also an expression of the government’s ambition to rapidly expand the production of hydropower. In fact, the exploitation of the country’s water resources was seen as key to Ethiopia’s economic growth.Footnote ⁹⁸ The long-term presence of Italian companies in the country, and their relationship with the local authorities which had strengthened during the famine, entered a new phase.Footnote ⁹⁹ In 2011, Salini CostruzioniFootnote ¹⁰⁰ began work on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile, the colossal and controversial project which is still ongoing and which resulted in strong diplomatic tension between Addis Ababa and Cairo.Footnote ¹⁰¹

VI

The history of the Tana-Beles project developed along several decades and it connected the colonial and postcolonial ages. The fascist authorities saw the ‘hostile nature’ of their colonial possessions as a crucial challenge to be met, and at the end of the 1950s investment in infrastructure, in order to master the environment and boost the local economy, had become one of the cornerstones of Italian aid policies in Ethiopia. Thirty years later, it was the main pillar of Italy’s response to the famine. Furthermore, the penetration in the Horn of Africa of private companies, which played a pivotal role in implementing relief programmes, was rooted in the colonial period. Yet, it would be misleading to see the continuities as essential and looking at postcolonial international aid as the continuation of imperialism by other means. The story of the Tana-Beles project reveals a far more complex picture, and postcolonial aid emerges as the transformation of old practices and existing ties into new policies which were subsequently modified over time and brought together the aims and ambitions of various different actors.

In the case of the relief programmes that Italy and Ethiopia agreed upon, their respective national governments were undoubtedly the two major players. Italian authorities aimed at fostering their own interests in terms of the country’s economic expansion, hegemony in the Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa, and – on the occasion of the famine – meeting domestic pressure for a prompt response to the problem of hunger in the ‘Third World’. However, it was equally important to Italy to maintain its own membership of the ‘club of the rich’, and thus the decisions taken in Rome had to fit the DAC’s standards. The OECD’s Development and Assistance Committee was an influential indirect player in the history of Italian aid to Ethiopia, as was the European parliament, whose resolution encouraged Italy to implement a special programme against starvation during the mid-1980s. Ethiopia experienced radical institutional changes during the period in question, namely the revolutionary movement overthrowing Haile Selassie and establishing the DERG regime in the mid-1970s, and the later overthrow of Mengistu by the EPRDF in 1991. Visions of social and economic development changed accordingly, and they strongly influenced Ethiopian negotiations with Italy for aid programmes. Furthermore, Italy was not the most important donor for Ethiopia, and decisions taken in Addis Ababa depended also on its relations with London, Washington, and – in the DERG’s case – Moscow. On the part of the ‘recipient country’ too, multiple indirect actors came into play in designing the aid programme agreement between Ethiopia and Italy. Throughout the course of the Tana-Beles project, postcolonial international aid emerged as a complex process of joint construction that not only illuminates ‘the ways in which humanitarianism was appropriated resisted, rejected and subverted’ by its ‘beneficiaries’,Footnote ¹⁰² but also challenges the recurrent focus on the binary relationship between donors (former colonial states) and recipients (new independent states).

The long history of the project for the production of hydroelectric power and the development of agriculture in the Beles Valley sheds light on another important feature of postcolonial humanitarianism, as it brings to the fore the decisive role played by private enterprises. That prominent role was not simply the result of donors’ plans being passively accepted by recipients. Drawing on the historiography of economics, which has highlighted the prominence of independent states’ policies regarding the private business sector and foreign capital,Footnote ¹⁰³ this article demonstrates that Ethiopian institutions and Italian enterprises concerned tailored their own relations, despite the regime changes. Partners re-negotiated their mutual interests over the course of time: Studio Pietrangeli and Salini Costruzioni benefited from the significant Italian budget for emergencies, and Mengistu attempted to implement his resettlement scheme. A detailed investigation has already examined the relevance of the public–private partnership in the field of aid in the decades after the Second World War, with a focus on the interaction among different players within Western countries.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This study shows the transnational dimension of the public–private partnership linking institutions and business companies across the boundaries of donor and recipient states. Furthermore, co-operation between the Ethiopian authorities and Italian companies lasted well beyond the rule of the DERG and the emergency phase – as the involvement of Pietrangeli and Salini in the GERD project shows – and it accompanied the expansion of the two Italian firms in the global business of infrastructure construction.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The end of empires undoubtedly strengthened the international nature of humanitarianism,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ but it also favoured its connections to globalization in terms of capital circulation, integration of markets, and movement of goods.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Seen from the perspective of the Tana-Beles project, the story of international mobilization against famine extends well before and beyond the mid-1980s. On the one hand, it embraces the years thereafter when the schemes, relationships, and strategies set in motion during the famine were developed further. On the other hand, the history of the humanitarian response to the famine is rooted in previous colonial period and in the decades after the Second World War, when ‘ordinary’ aid programmes regarding Ethiopia took shape. Reaction to the emergency did not erase the previously established policies and practices but rather reshaped, enhanced, and transformed them. There can be no doubt that the response to crisis in the new, fragile, unstable geopolitical context was a distinct feature of postcolonial humanitarianism.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Yet, this article places that response within a broader timeframe, as it explores the various forms of interaction between aid provision and decolonization. At the same time, it seeks to counteract the ‘tyranny of emergency’, meaning not only the policy whereby relief represents no more than an immediate response to ‘humanitarian crisis’,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ but also the tendency to look at ‘humanitarian crises’ as ‘exceptional’ moments in both the past and the present.

The Tana-Beles project officially ended in 1994, and the final assessment given by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs experts was generally negative: the hydroelectric part of the scheme had been shelved, and other infrastructural works had failed to encourage the foreseen development of agriculture. Public debate and scholarly literature have largely pointed to the disproportion between the amount of resources provided to the Ethiopian government and the effective benefits reaped by the starving population. Italy’s main project to combat hunger in Ethiopia could be included here. Nonetheless, the Italian experience is revealing since it challenges the narrative about famine in Ethiopia as the paradigmatic case of aid failure due to local political manipulation. The DERG’s instrumentalization of aid during the 1980s crisis is prevalent in the literature, and according to Michael Barnett humanitarianism was unsuccessful in Ethiopia because the ‘government manipulated aid for its own purposes’ and used it ‘as an instrument for its military and political campaign’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This view ends up reiterating the idea of a binary relationship between donors and recipients, translating it into the dualism of ‘the manipulated versus the manipulators’. As a consequence, the responsibility of beneficiaries in the accomplishment (or otherwise) of their own relief is overemphasized. The Tana-Beles project shows, on the contrary, that the provision of international aid and the resulting outcome stems from the interweaving of donors’ and recipients’ aims, actions, and strategies, which in turn involve multiple actors at national and international level. Thus, investigating the case of Italy and Ethiopia, this article further demonstrates the need to challenge the narrative of donor countries which still dominates the history of humanitarianism.Footnote ¹¹¹