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Genocide in Libya
Winner of the L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies 2022 This original research on the forgotten Libyan genocide specifically recovers the hidden history of the fascist Italian concentration camps (1929–1934) through the oral testimonies of Libyan survivors. This book links the Libyan genocide through cross-cultural and comparative readings to the colonial roots of the Holocaust and genocide studies. Between 1929 and 1934, thousands of Libyans lost their lives, directly murdered and victim to Italian deportations and internments. They were forcibly removed from their homes, marched across vast tracks of deserts and mountains, and confined behind barbed wire in 16 concentration camps. It is a story that Libyans have recorded in their Arabic oral history and narratives while remaining hidden and unexplored in a systematic fashion, and never in the manner that has allowed us to comprehend and begin to understand the extent of their existence. Based on the survivors’ testimonies, which took over ten years of fieldwork and research to document, this new and original history of the genocide is a key resource for readers interested in genocide and Holocaust studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and African and Middle Eastern studies.
214 pages, Paperback
Published August 7, 2020
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October 22, 2025
All North Africa was subjected to various forms of European domination (ranging from settler colonialism to protectorates) throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the colonial policies implemented across this geographic region were almost identical, differing only in the name of the colonizer. The area that would later become known as Libya was among these colonies, occupied by Italy, where Fascist Italy carried out a genocidal campaign against its population. But the question remains: why has this genocide remained almost hidden from the world? And why has Fascist Italy been portrayed in the Western imagination merely as an ordinary dictatorship, with no record of committing horrific crimes abroad?
These and other questions are what Ali Abdullatif Ahmida seeks to answer in his book, a work that he devoted significant time and effort to complete, and whose title perfectly reflects its purpose: Genocide in Libya.
The main argument that Ahmida presents in his book is a challenge to the dominant historical narrative surrounding Italian colonialism in Libya, particularly during the Fascist period in Italy. He offers a new interpretation of that history by uncovering what has been silenced or omitted in the traditional archival sources of colonial powers.
To achieve this, Ahmida turns to a new kind of source, which is oral history in Libya, by interviewing survivors of the Italian concentration camps in the country. He takes advantage of the fact that oral culture, especially through poetic expression, is one of the defining characteristics of the Libyan people. In this way, many of the stories of that tragedy have survived and been preserved through oral transmission.
The first issue discussed by Ahmida in his book is the problem of sources. His idea of writing about the genocide committed against Libyans by Italian fascism began to take shape while he was preparing his doctoral dissertation during the 1980s and 1990s. However, during this process, he discovered that many _if not most_ archival sources had been hidden or deliberately destroyed, either by the Italian government or by former fascists who had been reintegrated into public life in Italy. Prominent Italian researchers and historians such as Giorgio Rochat and Angelo Del Boca confirmed his suspicions regarding the manipulation or destruction of documents that incriminated fascist Italy in the crime of genocide against Libyans. Considering this manipulation of the official fascist records concerning the concentration camps in Libya, the author of the book hastened to find another source that was also on the verge of disappearing _namely, interviews with Libyans who had survived those camps. However, this undertaking also presented numerous methodological challenges, primarily because a significant amount of time had passed since the genocide in the Libyan concentration camps. This lapse of time had resulted in the death of many survivors due to old age, as well as the difficulty the author faced in collecting testimonies from survivors across the various camps to construct a comprehensive picture of what had taken place in those fascist camps in Libya. (pp 24-26).
When Ahmida began his fieldwork to identify the primary sources available in Libya that he could rely on, he discovered that three Libyan universities held important materials related to the Italian concentration camps. He also found that many Libyan families had preserved their own private family archives. He suggests that their reluctance to donate these archives to the modern Libyan state stemmed from their bitter experience with colonialism, which left them distrustful of the state and viewing it as something alien that could not be trusted with their personal documents.
The author also notes that a local organization provided him with significant assistance _the Memory Association of the City of Hun in central Libya, founded by the Libyan poet Senusi Habib. This association had made remarkable progress in collecting the oral history of the Italian colonial period in the city. (pp 31, 32)
In addition to these sources, Ahmida also conducted interviews with numerous Libyan families who shared with him letters, photographs, and poems written by detainees. However, he faced considerable difficulties during this stage, as it was not easy for those families to trust him and hand over their documents. He also encountered another type of challenge: listening to people’s testimonies, especially those of survivors _a deeply human process that requires awareness and a sense of responsibility. Moreover, as the author himself was Libyan, his work took the form of “insider ethnography”, which raises questions concerning the researcher’s dual identity and the complex power dynamics between the researcher and the participants. (p 33)
The author then moves in the second chapter to discuss what he considers a “myth” the portrayal of Italian fascism as having not committed acts of genocide or mass murder. He argues that the existence of German Nazism and the Western focus on it largely contributed to turning a blind eye to the crimes of Italian fascism. By conducting a comparative study among colonial powers, Ahmida contends that the modern history of Italy cannot be confined within its geographical borders alone; rather, it must also encompass the history of its colonies in Africa and the crimes it committed there.
The author also discusses how different approaches have emerged in writing the modern history of Italy. The most racist among them, as Ahmida puts it, is what he calls the Eurocentric school, which portrays the history of Italian fascism as a benevolent one that helped spread “civilization” among the indigenous population in Libya. On the other hand, the most progressive trend in historical writing is the one that explicitly acknowledges the genocide committed by fascist Italy. However, Ahmida criticizes this school for overlooking the long-term consequences of that crime on Libya, Libyans, and even Italians themselves. He also critiques the school of contemporary comparative genocide studies, which continues to exclude Libya and the genocide that took place there from its scope of study (p 52)
Ahmida argues that the persistent description of Italian fascism as “benevolent” stems primarily from the stereotypical perception of Italy as the cradle of romanticism and classical values. When distinguishing between the crimes of Nazism and those of Italian fascism, he writes:
“German Nazis killed Europeans, creating outrage among other Europeans, but Italian Fascists killed North African Muslims, playing into Orientalist fantasies and racist and modernist colonial ideologies, about the dehumanized, backward natives, and the price of modernity to justify the need to ‘exterminate all the brutes.’ These perspectives created the context in which Italian Fascism was seen as gentle – perhaps an aberration – while the German character, commonly viewed as militaristic, naturally resulted in the horrors of the Nazis.” (p 53)
Even Hollywood contributed to reinforcing this perception of Italian fascism, while the Italian government played a major role in silencing any voices that might expose the genocide it committed. For example, it purchased a BBC-produced film titled A Fascist Legacy (1989), which almost disappeared from existence until the author managed to find a copy of it in 2017. (54).
Ahmida also argues that the perception of fascism as being less evil than Nazism is partly since Italian fascism did not adopt the same genocidal policy toward the Jews. In fact, the Fascist Party even included about twenty Jewish officials among its senior members. Ahmida criticizes the philosopher Hannah Arendt for omitting any discussion of the Italian genocide in Libya in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. However, he offers a possible justification, noting that the book was written early in her career. Nevertheless, he maintains that Arendt’s work contributed, to some extent, to reinforcing the benign image of Italian fascism. (p 56).
In contrast to this deliberate silencing, Ahmida turned to oral history to compensate for the severe lack of written archival sources. His reliance on this type of nontraditional source is understandable, given that he spent many years in the United States, where the approach known as “people’s history” or “history from below” emerged. In the twentieth century, American historians influenced by the Marxist school of history sought to write the history of Black people in the United States. Finding few written records, they turned instead to the voices of Black communities, preserving and analyzing their orally transmitted memories through rigorous methodologies in order to reconstruct the lived experiences of Black people during and after slavery in America. This is precisely what Ahmida did, as he discovered that the genocide committed against Libyans did not only target their lives, but also destroyed their livestock, displaced them from their lands, and aimed _through fascist policies_ to eradicate their culture as well. (p 65)
Ahmida criticizes the studies that described Italian fascism as “moderate,” arguing that such works relied solely on incomplete or manipulated archival materials and treated them as unquestionable truths. In contrast, oral history offers a different picture from what those distorted archives narrate, as the oral testimonies of the Libyan people reveal how survivors preserved the memory of what happened in the concentration camps and during the period of Italian colonial rule in Libya. (p 80).
The author notes that Libyans who lived through that historical period unanimously used a single word to describe what they endured: “Shar” a term derived from Arabic meaning literally “evil”, the opposite of “good.” However, the survivors of the Fascist concentration camps in Libya used the word “Shar” in a different sense to describe the famine that haunted them in those camps. Famine, more than anything else, was the greatest suffering they experienced, and it was deliberately created by Italian Fascism after uprooting them from their lands, depriving them in most cases even of eating the meat of their livestock, which were left to die without allowing them to benefit from them.
Ahmida compares this Libyan term “Shar” to the word “Shoah”, used by Jews to refer to the Holocaust. He also draws a parallel between the Libyan concept of “Shar” (evil) and the Arabic term itself: shar, meaning evil, which closely resembles the sense proposed by philosopher Hannah Arendt in her discussion of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. Arendt interpreted Eichmann’s role in the genocide as that of a bureaucrat simply performing his duty and thus coined the phrase “The Banality of Evil.” (pp 98, 99).
The author also addresses the idea of “memory and forgetting” among the Italian and Libyan peoples. For instance, he notes that the public in Italy has embraced the myth of a “moderate” colonial past under fascism. Ahmida describes this acceptance as a form of collective amnesia, arguing that as a result, figures such as General Graziani, who committed acts of genocide in Libya, are now remembered by Italians in a positive and even honorable light _to the extent that a statue was erected in his hometown.
Regarding this paradox between remembrance and forgetting, the Lebanese scholar Wajih Kawtharani discusses “the dialectic of remembering and forgetting,” considering it essential for nations seeking to construct their national identity. He gives the example of the French Revolution, where French historians worked to commemorate the sacrifices of the revolution’s martyrs so that their contributions to nation-building would not be lost to oblivion. In contrast to this deliberate revival of memory, there also exists an opposing process _forgetting_ which Kawtharani views as necessary for societies to move forward, since excessive revisiting of the past and excavation of history can reignite present-day conflicts among sects, tribes, and ethnic groups.
The reason behind the forgetting of the genocide committed by Italy is directly linked to the systematic process carried out by the Italian authorities to silence history. Michel Foucault argues that power is not merely a repressive tool exercised from the top down, but rather a complex network that produces systems of knowledge and discourse through which truth is defined and legitimized within society. Institutions such as universities, archives, and museums, according to Foucault, do not simply transmit truth, they “produce” and “reproduce” it in ways that serve the interests of dominant power structures.
In this light, the silencing of Italian colonial crimes in Libya can be understood as a product of this relationship between power and knowledge. The Italian state, along with European academic institutions, contributed to the construction of a dominant historical discourse that portrayed Italian Fascism as “moderate” while concealing its colonial atrocities. Thus, historical forgetting becomes a form of power practice, reshaping collective consciousness in accordance with the interests of political and cultural hegemonies.
These and other questions are what Ali Abdullatif Ahmida seeks to answer in his book, a work that he devoted significant time and effort to complete, and whose title perfectly reflects its purpose: Genocide in Libya.
The main argument that Ahmida presents in his book is a challenge to the dominant historical narrative surrounding Italian colonialism in Libya, particularly during the Fascist period in Italy. He offers a new interpretation of that history by uncovering what has been silenced or omitted in the traditional archival sources of colonial powers.
To achieve this, Ahmida turns to a new kind of source, which is oral history in Libya, by interviewing survivors of the Italian concentration camps in the country. He takes advantage of the fact that oral culture, especially through poetic expression, is one of the defining characteristics of the Libyan people. In this way, many of the stories of that tragedy have survived and been preserved through oral transmission.
The first issue discussed by Ahmida in his book is the problem of sources. His idea of writing about the genocide committed against Libyans by Italian fascism began to take shape while he was preparing his doctoral dissertation during the 1980s and 1990s. However, during this process, he discovered that many _if not most_ archival sources had been hidden or deliberately destroyed, either by the Italian government or by former fascists who had been reintegrated into public life in Italy. Prominent Italian researchers and historians such as Giorgio Rochat and Angelo Del Boca confirmed his suspicions regarding the manipulation or destruction of documents that incriminated fascist Italy in the crime of genocide against Libyans. Considering this manipulation of the official fascist records concerning the concentration camps in Libya, the author of the book hastened to find another source that was also on the verge of disappearing _namely, interviews with Libyans who had survived those camps. However, this undertaking also presented numerous methodological challenges, primarily because a significant amount of time had passed since the genocide in the Libyan concentration camps. This lapse of time had resulted in the death of many survivors due to old age, as well as the difficulty the author faced in collecting testimonies from survivors across the various camps to construct a comprehensive picture of what had taken place in those fascist camps in Libya. (pp 24-26).
When Ahmida began his fieldwork to identify the primary sources available in Libya that he could rely on, he discovered that three Libyan universities held important materials related to the Italian concentration camps. He also found that many Libyan families had preserved their own private family archives. He suggests that their reluctance to donate these archives to the modern Libyan state stemmed from their bitter experience with colonialism, which left them distrustful of the state and viewing it as something alien that could not be trusted with their personal documents.
The author also notes that a local organization provided him with significant assistance _the Memory Association of the City of Hun in central Libya, founded by the Libyan poet Senusi Habib. This association had made remarkable progress in collecting the oral history of the Italian colonial period in the city. (pp 31, 32)
In addition to these sources, Ahmida also conducted interviews with numerous Libyan families who shared with him letters, photographs, and poems written by detainees. However, he faced considerable difficulties during this stage, as it was not easy for those families to trust him and hand over their documents. He also encountered another type of challenge: listening to people’s testimonies, especially those of survivors _a deeply human process that requires awareness and a sense of responsibility. Moreover, as the author himself was Libyan, his work took the form of “insider ethnography”, which raises questions concerning the researcher’s dual identity and the complex power dynamics between the researcher and the participants. (p 33)
The author then moves in the second chapter to discuss what he considers a “myth” the portrayal of Italian fascism as having not committed acts of genocide or mass murder. He argues that the existence of German Nazism and the Western focus on it largely contributed to turning a blind eye to the crimes of Italian fascism. By conducting a comparative study among colonial powers, Ahmida contends that the modern history of Italy cannot be confined within its geographical borders alone; rather, it must also encompass the history of its colonies in Africa and the crimes it committed there.
The author also discusses how different approaches have emerged in writing the modern history of Italy. The most racist among them, as Ahmida puts it, is what he calls the Eurocentric school, which portrays the history of Italian fascism as a benevolent one that helped spread “civilization” among the indigenous population in Libya. On the other hand, the most progressive trend in historical writing is the one that explicitly acknowledges the genocide committed by fascist Italy. However, Ahmida criticizes this school for overlooking the long-term consequences of that crime on Libya, Libyans, and even Italians themselves. He also critiques the school of contemporary comparative genocide studies, which continues to exclude Libya and the genocide that took place there from its scope of study (p 52)
Ahmida argues that the persistent description of Italian fascism as “benevolent” stems primarily from the stereotypical perception of Italy as the cradle of romanticism and classical values. When distinguishing between the crimes of Nazism and those of Italian fascism, he writes:
“German Nazis killed Europeans, creating outrage among other Europeans, but Italian Fascists killed North African Muslims, playing into Orientalist fantasies and racist and modernist colonial ideologies, about the dehumanized, backward natives, and the price of modernity to justify the need to ‘exterminate all the brutes.’ These perspectives created the context in which Italian Fascism was seen as gentle – perhaps an aberration – while the German character, commonly viewed as militaristic, naturally resulted in the horrors of the Nazis.” (p 53)
Even Hollywood contributed to reinforcing this perception of Italian fascism, while the Italian government played a major role in silencing any voices that might expose the genocide it committed. For example, it purchased a BBC-produced film titled A Fascist Legacy (1989), which almost disappeared from existence until the author managed to find a copy of it in 2017. (54).
Ahmida also argues that the perception of fascism as being less evil than Nazism is partly since Italian fascism did not adopt the same genocidal policy toward the Jews. In fact, the Fascist Party even included about twenty Jewish officials among its senior members. Ahmida criticizes the philosopher Hannah Arendt for omitting any discussion of the Italian genocide in Libya in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. However, he offers a possible justification, noting that the book was written early in her career. Nevertheless, he maintains that Arendt’s work contributed, to some extent, to reinforcing the benign image of Italian fascism. (p 56).
In contrast to this deliberate silencing, Ahmida turned to oral history to compensate for the severe lack of written archival sources. His reliance on this type of nontraditional source is understandable, given that he spent many years in the United States, where the approach known as “people’s history” or “history from below” emerged. In the twentieth century, American historians influenced by the Marxist school of history sought to write the history of Black people in the United States. Finding few written records, they turned instead to the voices of Black communities, preserving and analyzing their orally transmitted memories through rigorous methodologies in order to reconstruct the lived experiences of Black people during and after slavery in America. This is precisely what Ahmida did, as he discovered that the genocide committed against Libyans did not only target their lives, but also destroyed their livestock, displaced them from their lands, and aimed _through fascist policies_ to eradicate their culture as well. (p 65)
Ahmida criticizes the studies that described Italian fascism as “moderate,” arguing that such works relied solely on incomplete or manipulated archival materials and treated them as unquestionable truths. In contrast, oral history offers a different picture from what those distorted archives narrate, as the oral testimonies of the Libyan people reveal how survivors preserved the memory of what happened in the concentration camps and during the period of Italian colonial rule in Libya. (p 80).
The author notes that Libyans who lived through that historical period unanimously used a single word to describe what they endured: “Shar” a term derived from Arabic meaning literally “evil”, the opposite of “good.” However, the survivors of the Fascist concentration camps in Libya used the word “Shar” in a different sense to describe the famine that haunted them in those camps. Famine, more than anything else, was the greatest suffering they experienced, and it was deliberately created by Italian Fascism after uprooting them from their lands, depriving them in most cases even of eating the meat of their livestock, which were left to die without allowing them to benefit from them.
Ahmida compares this Libyan term “Shar” to the word “Shoah”, used by Jews to refer to the Holocaust. He also draws a parallel between the Libyan concept of “Shar” (evil) and the Arabic term itself: shar, meaning evil, which closely resembles the sense proposed by philosopher Hannah Arendt in her discussion of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. Arendt interpreted Eichmann’s role in the genocide as that of a bureaucrat simply performing his duty and thus coined the phrase “The Banality of Evil.” (pp 98, 99).
The author also addresses the idea of “memory and forgetting” among the Italian and Libyan peoples. For instance, he notes that the public in Italy has embraced the myth of a “moderate” colonial past under fascism. Ahmida describes this acceptance as a form of collective amnesia, arguing that as a result, figures such as General Graziani, who committed acts of genocide in Libya, are now remembered by Italians in a positive and even honorable light _to the extent that a statue was erected in his hometown.
Regarding this paradox between remembrance and forgetting, the Lebanese scholar Wajih Kawtharani discusses “the dialectic of remembering and forgetting,” considering it essential for nations seeking to construct their national identity. He gives the example of the French Revolution, where French historians worked to commemorate the sacrifices of the revolution’s martyrs so that their contributions to nation-building would not be lost to oblivion. In contrast to this deliberate revival of memory, there also exists an opposing process _forgetting_ which Kawtharani views as necessary for societies to move forward, since excessive revisiting of the past and excavation of history can reignite present-day conflicts among sects, tribes, and ethnic groups.
The reason behind the forgetting of the genocide committed by Italy is directly linked to the systematic process carried out by the Italian authorities to silence history. Michel Foucault argues that power is not merely a repressive tool exercised from the top down, but rather a complex network that produces systems of knowledge and discourse through which truth is defined and legitimized within society. Institutions such as universities, archives, and museums, according to Foucault, do not simply transmit truth, they “produce” and “reproduce” it in ways that serve the interests of dominant power structures.
In this light, the silencing of Italian colonial crimes in Libya can be understood as a product of this relationship between power and knowledge. The Italian state, along with European academic institutions, contributed to the construction of a dominant historical discourse that portrayed Italian Fascism as “moderate” while concealing its colonial atrocities. Thus, historical forgetting becomes a form of power practice, reshaping collective consciousness in accordance with the interests of political and cultural hegemonies.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 28, 2023
A tough but necessary read for anyone interested in how history influences the modern day. By respectfully seeking out the poets and keepers of oral history, the author has brought the colonial experience in Libya out into the light of day. The experience of the Libyan people, particularly in the eastern part of the country, in extermination camps designed by the Italian fascist government, is history that I did not know. The author has done both the world as well as the Libyan people a service by publishing this research, because this story is not well known, particularly the chilling part about German fascists visiting the area to observe how the Italian government pushed out and killed native people in order to re colonize with their own countrymen. The author has also shown great respect to the storytellers who preserve oral history and reminded us that history is more than books, and more than what the victors recall.
September 28, 2023
This book, as a Libyan, was difficult to read but it's mandatory. He uncovers a genocide which devastated 50% of the population in Barqa(east libya) and that culled all livestock (600,00+) so much so the italians had to import them. What stuck with me is when he said (paraphrasing) that Libya can only consider itself a successful country once it can honour those murdered in the genocide. I wholeheartedly agree sir.
June 28, 2025
the tradition of folklore poetry in Libya is so beautiful and powerful. what has happened in Libya MUST be discussed and centered in a serious manner, particularly to understand how Libya has come to be in the modern context. heartbreaking.
the insight as well on how italian fascism was downplayed by the West who refused to put any individual Italian fascists on trial because it might bolster the strong Italian communist partisans; anti-communism is so ridiculous.
the insight as well on how italian fascism was downplayed by the West who refused to put any individual Italian fascists on trial because it might bolster the strong Italian communist partisans; anti-communism is so ridiculous.
March 12, 2024
Useful source of information about the genocide in Libya under Italy.
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