Italy's Shame: The Massacre in Ethiopia

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2017

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1937 Italian forces occupying the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa began a three day campaign of killings which left thousands of Ethiopian civilians dead. Alex Last has been speaking to Ambassador Imru Zelleke, who witnessed the massacre as a child. The violence began after a grenade attack wounded Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, the man appointed by Mussolini to govern Ethiopia. Italian forces had invaded the country in 1935 as Mussolini tried to expand Italian colonial territories in East Africa. Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, then called Abyssinia, was forced into exile. Ethiopia was a member of the League of Nations, but despite appeals, Western powers refused to intervene to stop the Italian invasion. The massacre is known in Ethiopia by it's date in the Ethiopian calender,Yekatit 12. Photo: The arrival of an Italian official in Italian-occupied Addis Ababa. The slogan on the banner reads: 'To whom does the empire belong? Duce! Duce! To ourselves!' (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:04.7	My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:08.5	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.
0:18.0	What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
0:24.6	poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.
0:29.7	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC
0:35.4	Sounds.
0:36.4	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:40.9	My name's Linda Davies and I commissioned
0:43.0	podcast for BBC Sounds.
0:45.0	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality,
0:49.0	featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.
0:54.4	What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
1:00.9	poltergeist, cricket and conspiracy theories, and that's just a few examples.
1:06.4	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over
1:11.1	at BBC Sounds.
1:12.3	Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC World Service with me Alex Last.
1:18.0	And today in this episode our eyewitness takes us back 80 years to the late 1930s when during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia
1:27.7	Italian forces launched a campaign of killing and repression across the country in which thousands of Ethiopians were of The massacre went only not in Addis but all over the country wherever the Italians were.
1:47.0	Over 30,000 people died on that date.
1:50.0	The first wave, it was wild. Then later it became systematic.
1:55.0	The seeds of this crime were sewn two years earlier.
	...

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