Italian Fascist War Crimes in Ethiopia - Societa italiana di storia ...

100 Richard Pankhurst
This communication constituted no more than a “holding operation.” The
Foreign Office was aware that it had to formulate a substantive reply, as well as
to fend off pressure from other supporters of Ethiopia, and doubtless before
long, also from the Ethiopian Government itself. Allen and his colleagues therefore
again formulated their thoughts on Ethiopia’s exclusion, and their justification
thereof.
Allen wrote a further lengthy minute, on 10 Nove m b e r. He noted that supporters
of Ethiopian re p resentation “urged that Ethiopia was one of the first suff
e rers at the hands of the Axis nations and that many atrocities” had been
“committed against the Ethiopians and on Ethiopian territory by the Italians.”
H oweve r, he argued, there we re still “strong arguments” against Ethiopian membership.
The “chief” of them we re that it was 1) “at present proposed to limit the
i n vestigations of the Commission to crimes committed during the present wa r ” ;
2) “it might be difficult to secure the appointment to the Commission of other
members”; and 3) it was “unlikely that an Ethiopian re p re s e n t a t i ve would be in
a position to contribute much to the Commission’s pro c e e d i n g s . ”
These objections, he claimed, “outweigh[ed]” the case for representation.
The British Government should therefore, he urged, maintain its original line,
based on two contentions. Firstly, “the question would be one for decision by
all the Allied Governments represented on the Commission,” rather than
Britain alone; secondly, that “the consensus of opinion” (whatever that meant)
was “undoubtedly against Ethiopian representation.”
Allen’s observations were accepted by another official, Geoffrey Harrison,
who that day wrote a minute in which he more artfully declared: “I agree with
Mr Allen, except that, in view of the great popularity of Ethiopia in certain circles
in this country, I should have thought it preferable that we should leave the
onus for a decision with the Allied Govts. collectively and should be chary of
taking much of a lead ourselves.”
MacKereth, of the Egyptian Department, however, took a different view. On
the following day, he pointed to what he considered the immorality of
Ethiopia’s exclusion from the Commission, and wrote, with some force:
While I appreciate the inconvenience of having an Ethiopian representative
on the Commission I consider that the moral disadvantage of excluding
Ethiopia outweighs that inconvenience. It seems to me that we create