The Italo-Ethiopian treaty

On 2 August 1928 in Addis Ababa the Kingdom of Italy and the Ethiopian Empire signed a treaty of friendship, conciliation and arbitration. It was signed on behalf of King Victor Emmanuel III by the Italian minister plenipotentiary, Giuliano Cora, and on behalf of Ethiopia by the regent and heir to the throne, Ras Tafari Makonnen, who two years later became emperor as Haile Selassie I. The two states promised each other lasting peace and perpetual friendship, the development of trade and the settlement of all disputes by conciliation or before arbitrators, without recourse to force. The treaty was concluded for twenty years. On the same day a separate convention was signed which gave Ethiopia a free zone in the Eritrean port of Assab on the Red Sea and provided for the construction of a motor road from Assab to the town of Dessie in the interior. On paper it was one of the friendliest agreements any European colonial power ever concluded with an independent African state. In reality the two sides signed it with entirely different intentions, and less than seven years later the army of Benito Mussolini marched into Ethiopia without a declaration of war.

The memory of Adwa

In the 1920s Ethiopia was, together with Liberia, the only state in Africa that had never become a colony. It owed its independence above all to Emperor Menelik II’s victory over Italy. On 1 March 1896, at the Battle of Adwa, the Ethiopian army routed an Italian expeditionary corps that had tried to turn Ethiopia into a protectorate. It was the greatest defeat suffered by a European army in Africa in the colonial era. Italy had to recognise Ethiopia’s independence, but kept colonies on its fringes: Eritrea in the north and Italian Somaliland in the south-east. The border with Somaliland was never precisely demarcated on the ground, which years later was to have grave consequences.

In 1906 Britain, France and Italy – the three powers whose colonies surrounded Ethiopia – divided the country into spheres of influence in a tripartite agreement, in case it should break up. For Italian nationalists Adwa remained a disgrace that had to be wiped out. When Mussolini came to power in October 1922, Fascism made this wound part of its propaganda. Mussolini spoke of Italy as a young and numerous nation that deserved an empire, and in a major speech in the Chamber of Deputies on 26 May 1927, Ascension Day, he declared that the country must be ready to assert its rights at the right moment.

A regent in search of allies

From 1916 Ethiopia was ruled by Empress Zewditu, Menelik’s daughter, but day-to-day power was exercised by her cousin, the regent Ras Tafari. He was younger than most of the great nobles, had been educated, among others, by Capuchin missionaries in Harar, and was convinced that the country had to modernise if it was to survive surrounded by colonial empires. His greatest diplomatic success was Ethiopia’s admission to the League of Nations on 28 September 1923. Britain had doubts, pointing to the slavery that still existed in Ethiopia. France was in favour of admission, and so – which in the light of later events sounds paradoxical – was Italy. Ethiopia had to undertake to combat slavery and the arms trade. Membership of the League was meant to guarantee its independence. A few weeks earlier, however, the League had shown what it was worth in the face of a great power: after the murder of an Italian general on the Greek–Albanian border Mussolini bombarded and occupied Corfu, and the dispute was finally settled not by the League but by the Conference of Ambassadors.

In 1924 Tafari made a long journey through Europe and the Middle East. Among other places he visited Paris, London and Rome, where he met the King and Mussolini. One of his aims was to obtain Ethiopia’s own access to the sea, since all its foreign trade passed through the ports of foreign colonies, above all French Djibouti, to which the only railway line ran. He did not get it. A year later it turned out that his fears of the great powers had not been exaggerated. In December 1925 Britain and Italy exchanged notes in which London promised to support Italian plans for a railway from Eritrea to Somaliland through western Ethiopia and to recognise Italy’s economic influence there, while Rome promised to support British plans for a dam on Lake Tana, important for irrigating the Sudan. In 1926 Tafari protested to the League of Nations, and both powers gave assurances that they had no intention of infringing Ethiopia’s sovereignty. The matter died down, but the regent understood that London and Rome could come to an agreement at his expense.

The treaty and the road to Assab

After this episode Rome changed its tone. The Italian minister in Addis Ababa, Giuliano Cora, who had arrived there in December 1926, knew the country well and worked to improve relations. The talks ended on 2 August 1928 with the signing of two documents. The first was the treaty of friendship, conciliation and arbitration. The parties undertook not to take any action harmful to the other’s independence, to develop trade and to submit all disputes that could not be settled through ordinary diplomatic channels to conciliation and arbitration. The treaty was to remain in force for twenty years and to be registered with the League of Nations. The second document was the road convention. Italy granted Ethiopia a free zone in the port of Assab, and the two sides were jointly to build a motor road from Assab across the desert land of the Afar to Dessie in the province of Wollo, from where routes led up to the plateau and the capital.

For Ethiopia this meant the promise of a second window on the world of its own, independent of the French in Djibouti. For Italy the treaty was to be an instrument of economic penetration of the country. The road from Assab was to bind Ethiopian trade to the Italian colony, and Italian capital and influence were to follow the trade. In 1928 the King’s cousin, Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, the celebrated explorer, also visited the country, bringing the regent lavish gifts, among them a luxury Isotta Fraschini limousine.

The two sides, however, saw the treaty differently. Historians agree that Mussolini had no intention in practice of submitting disputes with Ethiopia to arbitration, while Tafari, who valued precisely the arbitration, had no intention of building the road. He saw it as a ready-made invasion route from Eritrea into the heart of the country and quietly put off its construction. The free zone at Assab remained largely on paper, and Italian economic penetration proved far more modest than Rome had hoped.

The treaty also mattered at home. In 1928 conservative nobles grouped around Empress Zewditu tried to overthrow the regent, and one of the charges against him was precisely his over-friendly policy towards Italy. Tafari emerged from this attempt stronger: on 7 October 1928 the Empress crowned him negus, that is, king, and after her death in April 1930 he became emperor. At his coronation on 2 November 1930 Italy was represented by the Prince of Udine, and relations between the two states appeared correct.

From friendship to Walwal

The friendship did not last long. From the mid-1920s Italian units from Somaliland had been pushing deep into the desert of the Ogaden, taking advantage of the lack of a demarcated border. From 1930 at the latest a permanent Italian post guarded the wells at the oasis of Walwal (Ual-Ual), which by the Ethiopian reading of the old agreements lay clearly on the Ethiopian side. At the end of 1932 Mussolini decided to prepare for war and instructed the Minister of the Colonies, Emilio De Bono, to draw up plans. In the reports of Italian diplomats from this period the “policy of friendship” with Addis Ababa pursued until then was described as fruitless.

On 5 December 1934 there was an exchange of fire at Walwal between Ethiopian soldiers and Somali troops in Italian service. More than a hundred people were killed on the Ethiopian side and several dozen on the Italian side. Ethiopia invoked the 1928 treaty and demanded arbitration, and in January 1935 it appealed to the League of Nations. Italy demanded an apology and compensation while sending further divisions to Eritrea and Somaliland. The arbitration commission, set up after a long delay, ruled on 3 September 1935 that neither side bore responsibility for the clash, since both regarded Walwal as their own territory. It did not rule at all on whom the oasis belonged to. This Abyssinia Crisis showed that the procedure laid down in the treaty worked only when both sides wanted peace.

The long shadow of the Addis Ababa treaty

On 3 October 1935, when the treaty of friendship still had thirteen years to run, Italy invaded Ethiopia from Eritrea and Somaliland without a declaration of war. The first objective was Adwa, taken within a few days, which propaganda presented as revenge for 1896. The League of Nations declared Italy the aggressor and imposed economic sanctions on it, but did not extend them to oil, and Britain did not close the Suez Canal. In December 1935 the Hoare–Laval Pact came to light, in which the British and French foreign ministers proposed handing over a large part of Ethiopia to Italy. The Italian army used poison gas on a massive scale, above all mustard gas, including against civilians. On 5 May 1936 Marshal Pietro Badoglio entered Addis Ababa, and on 9 May Mussolini proclaimed the founding of the empire, with Victor Emmanuel III taking the title of Emperor of Ethiopia.

On 30 June 1936 Haile Selassie addressed the Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva. He recalled that it was he who had concluded the 1928 treaty of friendship with Italy, which “absolutely forbade resort to armed force under any pretext whatever”, and described aircraft spraying poison over soldiers, women, children, herds, rivers and pastures. Shortly afterwards the League lifted the sanctions. The fate of the Addis Ababa treaty was, on a small scale, the fate of the whole system of collective security of the 1920s: undertakings to settle disputes peacefully, to go to arbitration and to renounce war proved worthless in the face of a dictator determined to break them and of great powers unwilling to stop him.

The consequences reached far beyond Africa. Adolf Hitler’s Germany, which had already left the League, did not join the sanctions and quickly recognised the Italian conquest, while the sanctions and the condemnation by the democracies pushed Italy towards Germany. In 1936 the Rome–Berlin Axis came into being, and the two dictators intervened together in Spain. While London’s and Paris’s attention was fixed on Ethiopia, on 7 March 1936 the Wehrmacht marched into the demilitarised Rhineland. The League of Nations, having failed to defend one of its members, ceased to be taken seriously by anyone. Ethiopia regained its independence only in 1941, when during the East African campaign British troops and Ethiopian partisans routed the Italian army, and on 5 May 1941, exactly five years after Badoglio, Haile Selassie returned to his capital.