Italian East Africa

Italian East Africa was the colony formed in 1936 by joining conquered Ethiopia to the older possessions of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. It lasted five years. The conquest was Mussolini's answer to Adwa, where Ethiopia had destroyed an Italian army in 1896 - the only decisive African victory over a European invader that produced a lasting independent state. The 1935 invasion used air power, motorised columns and mustard gas sprayed from aircraft on troops, villages and Red Cross hospitals, in breach of a protocol Italy had signed. The League of Nations imposed sanctions that excluded oil and did not close the Suez Canal, and Haile Selassie's speech to the Assembly in Geneva in 1936 is the moment the League's authority is usually said to have died. Occupation was never complete. The Arbegnoch resistance held much of the countryside, and an assassination attempt on the viceroy Graziani in 1937 was answered by three days of massacre in Addis Ababa and the killing of the monks of Debre Libanos. Racial laws forbade mixed marriage and segregated the cities. British and Commonwealth forces, with Ethiopian irregulars, destroyed the colony between January and May 1941. Haile Selassie re-entered Addis Ababa five years to the day after leaving it. Eritrea passed to British administration and was federated with Ethiopia in 1952, which produced a thirty-year war of independence. The colony covered roughly 1.7 million square kilometres. Italy built several thousand kilometres of road, which was its most durable contribution. The obelisk of Axum was taken to Rome in 1937 and returned in 2005. Italy paid reparations to Ethiopia in 1947. The gas attacks were denied officially until 1996.

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