We are again living through a credibility test of the international system — and once again, a great power has elevated an ideology around its racial identity, and black people are being made to feel they count less than others. A grim anniversary passed this year almost unnoticed. Ninety years ago, in October 1935, Fascist Italy invaded Abyssinia — one of only three African states, alongside Liberia and South Africa, to retain formal sovereignty after the imperial partition of the continent.
What followed was not merely a colonial war. It was a decisive test of whether the international system created after World War 1 would defend its own rules when a powerful state violated them. Abyssinia fought back with courage and endurance.
Poorly armed, with almost no air force, its forces resisted for months against a modern European army. Italian aircraft bombed villages and troops at will. Mustard gas was sprayed from the air in flagrant violation of international law.
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Marcel Junod of the International Committee of the Red Cross later described thousands of men lying everywhere, their bodies burnt, crying out in agony. When Addis Ababa fell, the violence escalated. Educated young men were rounded up and shot.
After an attack on Italians in February 1937, Fascist Blackshirts in Addis were authorised to kill indiscriminately. Men, women and children were stabbed as they fled burning homes. Bodies were dumped into mass graves.
At Debra Libanos monastery, 425 monks and deacons were executed. This was the logical outcome of a system that spoke the language of law while practising the politics of power. Britain and France — the guarantors of the League of Nations — condemned the invasion, then ensured that sanctions would fail.
Oil was exempted. The Suez Canal remained open. Behind closed doors, they negotiated plans to reward Mussolini by carving up Abyssinia and granting him a colonial mandate over much of the country.
Emperor Haile Selassie fled Addis to make an impassioned address to the League of Nations in Geneva in June 1936, where he launched a scathing indictment on the international community. Collective security had been abandoned. Expediency had triumphed over principle.
His warning — “It is us today. It will be you tomorrow” — was met with indifference, even ridicule. The destruction of an African state was seen as regrettable, but normal.
The fate of Abyssinia showed Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan that treaties would not be enforced if enforcement risked war; that democracies feared conflict more than dishonour; and that expansion could proceed step by step. Within months, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland were invaded, one by one. World War 2 did not begin in Africa — but its inevitability was established there.
That lesson matters now because we are again living through acredibility test of the international system — and once again, a great power has elevated an ideology around its racial identity, and black people are being made to feel they count less than others. The liberal international order that emerged after 1945, shaped by the Atlantic Charter and the UN Charter, promised something radically different from the world of Abyssinia. It rejected spheres of influence and imperial carve-ups.
It rested on a demanding premise: borders would not be changed by force, and aggression would be met with collective resistance. That order, imperfect and unevenly applied, nonetheless opened the door to African decolonisation and statehood.
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