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The Italian Conquest of Libya and the Deportation of Libyans to Italy

1911–1926 · Middle East & North Africa

Displacement Territory Seized Mass Killing

Displaced

5,000

Approximately 5,000-6,000 Libyans were deported to Italy over the colonial period, of whom roughly 4,000 were transported between 1911 and 1918, according to the study by Francesca Di Pasquale in the International Review of Social History; they were held on Ustica, the Tremiti islands, Favignana, Ponza and in the military prison at Gaeta. Far larger numbers were displaced within Libya by the fighting and by the flight of populations into Egypt, Tunisia and the interior, which was never counted.

Share of the population affected

0.50%

of the population of the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica at the Italian invasion, 1911

Killed

10,000–100,000

direct killing

Territory

1,759,540 km²

Italy annexed Tripolitania and Cyrenaica by decree in November 1911, a claim the Ottoman Empire conceded at Ouchy in 1912; effective Italian control was limited to the coast until the reconquest campaigns launched in 1923, which by 1926 had taken the Jebel and Fezzan and set the stage for the concentration camps of Cyrenaica after 1929.

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What happened

Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire in September 1911 and landed at Tripoli, Benghazi and other coastal points. Rachel Simon, writing in 1914-1918-Online, records that after attacks on Italian forces on 23-26 October 1911 Italy punished the local population severely, killing over 4,000. Alongside the reprisals, Italy deported Libyan notables, suspected resisters and their families to penal islands off the Italian coast: Di Pasquale's study records 900 Libyans on Ustica of whom 127 died, about 17 percent, and 1,366 on the Tremiti islands of whom 437 died, about a third, from cholera, cold and overcrowding. Italian control was largely confined to the coastal towns until the Fascist government launched the reconquest of the interior from 1923, a campaign of columns, aerial bombing and the destruction of encampments that continued past 1926 and led to the mass internment of the Cyrenaican population in camps from 1929, outside the period covered here.

Parties

Italy invaded the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in 1911, carried out mass reprisals at Tripoli, deported Libyan notables and captives to penal islands in Italy, and from 1923 fought a reconquest of the interior

Disputed

Total Libyan deaths in the whole colonial war from 1911 to 1932 are contested, with Libyan official figures of several hundred thousand and Italian scholarly estimates lower; the figures for the 1911-26 phase alone are not separately established.

The denominator

Late Ottoman and early Italian estimates put the two provinces together at roughly 800,000 to 1 million in 1911; there was no census. The Italian census of 1936 counted 848,600 Libyans, after a quarter-century of war, famine, flight to Egypt and the Cyrenaica concentration camps.

The 5,000 refers to Libyans deported to Italian penal islands; the far larger Cyrenaica concentration camps of 1929-1934, which confined perhaps 100,000 people and killed tens of thousands, fall outside this event's dates.

Where the baseline comes from

Italian Libyaopen-edited
Italo-Turkish Waropen-edited

On the death toll

Simon records over 4,000 killed in the Tripoli reprisals of October 1911 alone. Di Pasquale documents mortality of 17 percent on Ustica and about a third on the Tremiti islands among deportees. Totals for Libyan deaths in the fighting, in reprisals and from war-driven famine and displacement between 1911 and 1926 are not established; Libyan accounts of the whole colonial war to 1932 run far higher, and Italian scholarship lower.

Documented forms of violence

Mass KillingSummary ExecutionArbitrary DetentionDestruction of Property

The October 1911 reprisals, the deportation of civilians to Italian penal islands and the mortality there are documented in Italian military and prison-administration archives analysed by Di Pasquale and summarised by Simon.