Italian Libya

Italian Libya was formally constituted as a single colony in 1934, uniting Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and the Fezzan, which Italy had been trying to hold since taking them from the Ottoman Empire in the war of 1911-12. The conquest had never actually been completed. Resistance in Cyrenaica under the Senussi order and its commander Omar al-Mukhtar, a Quran teacher in his sixties who fought a guerrilla war for twenty years, tied down Italian forces until 1931. The pacification under Graziani that ended it was among the most brutal episodes of European colonialism in Africa: the entire semi-nomadic population of the Jebel Akhdar, some hundred thousand people, was driven into concentration camps in the desert where perhaps forty thousand died, a four-hundred-kilometre barbed-wire fence was built along the Egyptian frontier to cut the rebels' supply, and al-Mukhtar was captured and publicly hanged before twenty thousand prisoners in 1931. Mussolini then declared Libya the fourth shore of Italy, settled tens of thousands of Italian farmers on expropriated land, and in 1937 rode into Tripoli holding a sword presented as the Sword of Islam. The colony ended with the North African campaign: British and Free French forces took Tripoli in January 1943 and the territory was placed under military administration. The United Nations made it an independent kingdom under the Senussi emir Idris in 1951, the first state to gain independence through the UN. Al-Mukhtar's face is on the Libyan ten-dinar note. Italy formally apologised for the colonial period in 2008 and agreed to pay compensation. The wire fence took six months to build. Idris was deposed by Gaddafi in 1969.

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