Even as he prepared to hand out alms that morning, to mark the feast of St. Michael, the most powerful of the archangels, the conqueror of Addis Ababa decided not to entrust his fate to God. General Rodolfo Graziani of the Italian military ordered the palace be studded with Breda Model 30 automatic rifles. Larger 6.5 mm Fiat-Revelli machine guns lined the outer walls. To the Ethiopian colonial police official Lieutenant Meleseliñ, historian Ian Campbell records, the guards seemed armed “as if they were hunting elephants.”
Following a failed grenade attack on Graziani by Ethiopian nationalists who emerged from the sullen crowd, the guards opened fire. Twenty thousand people, perhaps more, were slaughtered before the guns fell silent.
Yekatit 12 in the Ethiopian Ge’ez calendar—19 February 1937—is commemorated each year in the country. The United Kingdom’s foreign office suppressed its own damning report, claiming publication “would serve no useful purpose.” Fascist Italy ignored it, and the liberal nation-state that succeeded it still does so.
As the world witnesses the hideous toll of civilian lives in Israel’s war of retribution in Gaza, it’s important to remember the carnage of 1937—and others that have marked the course of the last century of warfare. Like past massacres, the killings in Gaza have led human rights organisations to demand respect for the laws of war.
For more than a hundred years, though, the idea that war can be civilised by law—along with fantasies about precision weapons and non-kinetic warfare—has served to tranquillise our imagination. A meaningful discussion must begin with what war is, not what we imagine it ought to be.
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The poison-gas war
From its outset, Fascist Italy’s war in Ethiopia defied international law, notably the Geneva Conventions against the use of chemical weapons. Historian Alberto Sbacchi has recorded that from the beginning of the Ethiopian campaign in May 1936 to Fascist Italy’s entry into the Second World War in June 1940, some 500 tonnes of chemicals Phosgene, Arsenite and Yperite were used against Ethiopians. “To terrorise the civil population Badoglio sprayed villages, herds, pastures, rivers, and lakes with Yperite,” Sbacchi notes.
Yperite—so named for its use in the battlefields of Ypres in the First World War, where it claimed 1,100 lives on its first use in 1915—had become well-known for its murderous effects.
French colonial troops who first encountered it in Ypres, a British officer wrote, were reduced to “a panic-stricken rabble of Turcos and Zouaves with grey faces and protruding eyeballs, clutching their throats and choking as they ran, many of them dropping in their tracks and lying on the sodden earth with limbs convulsed and features distorted in death.”
England resisted intervention, arguing it would push Fascist Italy’s ruler Benito Mussolini closer to Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler.
Then England and the United States resisted war crimes action, as part of an effort to install an anti-Communist regime in Italy. Marshal Pietro Badoglio, in charge of the savage campaign in Ethiopia and General Graziani’s boss, had turned against Mussolini in 1943. Ethiopia was excluded from the 17-country United Nations War Crimes Commission, which had been set up in 1943.
Even though Badoglio soon fell from power, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered Sir Noel Charles, the ambassador to Italy, to ensure the Marshal’s protection: “You are responsible for the Marshal’s safety and sanctuary,” Churchill wrote.
General Graziani—perhaps unique in having a war crime named after him—was sentenced to 19 years for collaborating with the Nazis but served only one. In 2012, $160,000 was spent by the town of Affile in Italy to erect a memorial to the General. He was never tried for his crimes in Ethiopia. The major Allied Powers—scholar Richard Pankhurst has bluntly observed—were “reluctant to see the trial of Fascist war criminals, especially as this would involve the trial and punishment of whites by blacks.”
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The real crime
This hypocrisy, of course, wasn’t the only one of its times. The members of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731 were tried and punished for their gruesome biological and chemical warfare experiments in China from 1931 to 1945. However, the perpetrators of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not, even though documents show their intent was the killing of large numbers of civilians. The long-forgotten verdict of a Tokyo court in 1963 held, persuasively, that the bombings were illegal even by the customary laws of war of the time.
Even today, as expert Adam Mount observes, the US doctrine does not rule out using nuclear weapons on civilian targets—and the reasons why it needs careful thinking through.
Killing civilians, as Benjamin Wittes argues, isn’t necessarily a war crime: Each strike which leads to casualties has to be assessed for intention. The deaths in Gaza, where Hamas terrorists are embedded in a dense population, could be the outcome of errors of judgement, intelligence that is faulty, or even the kinds of collateral damage permissible in war. Even bombing a hospital or school is permissible under international law under special circumstances—for example, if they are being used by an adversary to stage attacks.
The ongoing enquiry into the killing of eighty Afghans by élite British special forces in 2012, or the charges brought against Australian troops for war crimes tell us that militaries will punish some egregious crimes, as they always have. Far larger crimes against civilians, though, like the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz in 2016, have gone unpunished on the grounds that they were not intentionally targeted.
Like Israel, other major nation-states have used large-scale force in environments dense with civilians. Thousands of civilians are believed to have been killed in 1999-2000, during the second battle of Grozny, as Russian troops backed with armour, tanks and air-power battled Chechen jihadists.
For its part, India’s use of military force has caused large-scale civilian casualties in campaigns in the North-East, Kashmir as well as Telangana.
Eight hundred civilians were killed as the US forces battled insurgents from the Iraqi Fallujah, and tens of thousands more died in the war of which that campaign was just a small part.
Law professor Maria Varaki has correctly argued that the institutions and conventions of international law are being ignored by Russia as it fights in Ukraine. The US set the stage, notably rejecting an International Court of Justice judgment against its use of proxy warfare against Nicaragua.
A moral evasion
Fundamentally, efforts to civilise war represent an act of moral evasion. The scholar Gerald Fitzgerald has estimated that by the end of World War I on 11 November 1918, chemical weapons had caused 90,000 deaths—a small part of the 9.7 million soldiers’ lives lost. Even worse, arguably, guns and artillery left a long train of permanently maimed and psychologically traumatised soldiers. General Basil Liddell-Hart trenchantly observed in a 15 June 1926 article that gas was “more humane than shells.”
“I did not see in 1917, and I do not see in 1968, why tearing a man’s guts out by a high-explosive shell is to be preferred to maiming him by attacking his lungs or his skin,” scientist James Conant said in defence of his work on chemical weapons. “All war is immoral.”
Israel’s war in Gaza might be flailing—as its many critics, who include military thinkers in the country, contend. The country’s military, as Avi Jager argues has been seduced by shallow techno-babble, and left unprepared for ground wars. And its leaders might be making poor strategic decisions. There’s no reason to believe, though, that any other kind of war in Gaza might have been significantly more humane.
“Kind-hearted people might think there is some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed,” wrote the 19th-century theorist who conceptualised modern war, Carl Von Clausewitz. “They are wrong.”
“The mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst,” Clausewitz insisted.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the al-Qaeda operative held in Guantanamo Bay as he is tried for his alleged role in 9/11, concurred: “The language of war is killing,” he simply said.
The only true law of war is savagery. The crimes we can prevent are the political missteps, misjudgment, and hubris which lead up to them.
Praveen Swami is ThePrint’s National Security Editor. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)