Read Online I Didn't Do It for You by Michela Wrong - Free Book Online

team finds no evidence of night-time assassinations. It sympathizes with the general for the pressures he came under, finding that the colony’s existence ‘really was under threat’. As for the ‘supposed massacres’ of entire Eritrean military units, these ‘did not take place’. There might have been a couple of incidents in which rebels being escorted to the border–a mere 16, rather than 800–had been shot. But, adopting an approach favoured in many a rape trial, the team prefers to blame the victims, whose failure to cooperate with their captors brought their fate upon themselves. Another convenient scapegoat was the Eritrean police force, which apparently had a problem grasping the concept of military discipline.
    The very wording of the inquiry’s extraordinary conclusion, with its wealth of unconscious racism, tells us everything we need to know about the team’s philosophical point of departure. ‘If, in some isolated case, an abuse was committed, it can only be attributed to the savage temperament of the indigenous policemen necessarily entrusted with carrying out orders, and to the victims themselves,’ it reads. ‘Neither the [military] command nor any colonial officials can be held responsible.’ In the light of these findings, it was hardly surprising that a Massawa court absolved both Cagnassi and Livraghi, while sentencing two Eritrean police chiefs to long prison sentences. Newspapers which had called for an Italianwithdrawal from Eritrea were left flailing, the parliamentary debate on the matter–despite some sarcastic speeches by anti-colonial deputies–sputtered to an anti-climax, without a vote. The system had protected its own and, as several Italian officials revealed in memoirs published long after events, the mass killings and frenzied executions of suspected troublemakers swiftly resumed in Eritrea. 6
    The second report the team drafted represents, as far as the former anti-colonials on it were concerned, a further betrayal of principle. Rejecting the sceptical accounts of previous visitors, Martini and his colleagues hail Eritrea as a ‘fertile and virgin land…stretching out its arms to Italian farmers’. The colony, they say, is ideally placed to serve as an eventual outlet for Italy’s émigrés. To that end, Rome should concentrate on consolidating Eritrea’s borders, improving relations with local chiefs, replacing the military command with a civilian administration and attracting the peasant landowners who will form the backbone of a vibrant Italian community. Not an inch of acquired territory should be surrendered. With this endorsement, Italian seizure of Eritrea’s best land would become so unrestrained that even the once loyal chief of Akele Guzai province, Bahta Hagos, turned against the occupiers in 1894. His incipient rebellion, the greatest challenge to the colony until that date, was crushed, and his body left for the hyenas to worry. By burying a scandal that threatened to rock the government and bestowing its blessing on Italy’s African daydreams, the inquiry had granted a faltering colonial project a new lease of life. On this, the first of Martini’s two key encounters with Eritrea, the supposed freethinker had played a central role in a shameless whitewash which not only ensured Massawa’s atrocities quietly faded from view, but guaranteed the colony survived to be fought over another day.
    Why did Martini do it? Why did he risk his reputationby putting his name to what a historian of the day described as ‘an incredible, medieval document, which should have been confiscated as an apologia for the crime…A sickening defence of assassination’? 7
    Any journalist is familiar with the sensation of being ‘nobbled’ by the target of an investigation. Starting out on a story in a state of hostile cynicism, his views falter as one interviewee after another