By Otto Spijkers

I find it fascinating to watch newsreels of times I was not even born yet. My interest is mainly in newsreels related to the work of the United Nations and its predecessor: the League of Nations. There is not much film footage available of the League (some of it is available here), but one of the most dramatic events has been recorded. That is the conflict between Ethiopia and Italy in the 1930’s. For a short visual summary of the conflict, please watch this newsreel. Ethiopia joined the League of Nations in 1923. After some initial difficulties were overcome (the existence of slavery within Ethiopia was the main hurdle), Ethiopia was accepted by all members, including Italy, to join the League. According to the autobiography of Haile Selassie I, the leader of Ethiopia at the time, there was great joy at Addis Ababa when Ethiopia joined the League of Nations in 1923. "The rejoicing was for no reason other than that We thought that the Covenant of the League would protect us from the sort of attack which Italy has now [1935-1936] launched against us" (p. 77 of My Life and Ethiopia’s Progress). The Italian attack on Ethiopia of 1935 was, in the view of Italy in any case, a response to various skirmishes at the Somali-Ethiopian border, culminating in what is often referred to as the Walwal incident (see p. 37-44 of Mockler, Haile Selassie’s War). According to a border-treaty of 1908, the Walwal area, the land of the thousand wells, was located on the Ethiopian side of the Ethiopian-Somaliland border. (Somaliland was divided into three parts: a French (to the west), British (in the middle), and Italian (to the east).) However, it was occupied by the Italians at the time. When the Anglo-Ethiopian Joint Commission for the delimitation of the frontier between Ethiopia and British Somaliland , came to Walwal in 1934, the Commission’s Ethiopian military escort ended up fighting the Italian troops occupying the area. Over hundred people were killed in the fighting, the vast majority Ethiopians. That incident triggered a diplomatic poker game, played to a great extent in the Assembly halls in Geneva. It also triggered war. Ethiopia involved the League of Nations in the dispute from the early beginning. All the relevant documents were published in the League of Nations Official Journal, which is available online at heinonline. In some way or another, the dispute went through all the stages of dispute settlement set out in the League Covenant, including the imposition of economic sanctions on Italy. Ethiopia followed the procedure for the settlement of disputes as it was prescribed in the League of Nations Covenant (esp. Article 15), almost ad absurdum: provision after provision. At the same time Italy successfully invaded Ethiopia. The invasion was completed early May, 1936. Mussolini’s victory speech may not be all that interesting from a legal point of view. What is interesting, however, is that Mussolini used a humanitarian intervention type of justification for the intervention:

Abyssinia is Italian – Italian in fact because occupied by our victorious armies, Italian by right because with the sword of Rome it is civilization which triumphs over barbarism, justice which triumphs over cruel arbitrariness, the redemption of the miserable which triumphs over the slavery of a thousand years. (Speech by Mussolini, held in Rome on the 5th of May, 1936, on the evening of the fall of Addis Ababa (capital of Ethiopia), published in The Times, 6 May 1936.)

At the same time, Ethiopia sent a telegram to the Secretary-General of the League of Nations. It started as follows: "The crime has now been consummated. The Covenant has been torn up. Article 10 has been outrageously violated. Article 16 is not applied." It further stated that "[t]he desperate appeals launched by the Ethiopian Government did not succeed in arousing against the criminal aggressor the active co-operation of the signatories of the Covenant. The abandoned Ethiopian people felt infinite despair when at the beginning of March 1936 it realized that it must renounce the hope and faith which it had placed in the support of the League of Nations." (League of Nations Official Journal, volume 17, issue 6 (June 1936), p. 660-661.) The gathering of the Assembly of the League of Nations in June-July, 1936, was the dramatic high point of the dispute, at least as far as the League of Nations was involved. The Emperor of Ethiopia, in exile at that time, came in person to Geneva to address the Assembly, something no other (former) head of state, and certainly not Mussolini, had ever done. I’ll write about his famous speech in a few days. If the reader of this post wonders why one should bring up this old war now,i.e.what the lessons learned could be: well, those are, I believe, in that speech. – Otto