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

Italian Fascist War Crimes in Ethiopia 113
The Minister once more took refuge in evasion. Reflecting earlier Foreign
Office arguments, he suggested that the Commission might be unwilling to consider
crimes committed prior to 1939. This observation was remarkable in that
the Italian Draft Peace Treaty, approved by his Government a fortnight earlier,
had accepted the principle that the war for Ethiopia had begun on 3 October
1935. He thus replied:
I do not want now to debate the point put by my hon. and learned friend.
I understand that there is some doubt whether the United Nations War
Crimes Commission would feel that they had jurisdiction over acts committed
before 1939. 46
Despite the advent of a Labour Government, several of whose Parliamentary
supporters had clamored on Ethiopia’s behalf, and its acceptance of the Draft
Peace Treaty specifying that the war, for Ethiopia, began in 1935, the Foreign
Office had ensured that British policy was still opposed to Ethiopia’s inclusion
on the commission.
The Ethiopian Government’s 22 July 1946 Initiative
A week or so after that Parliamentary exchange, and less than a month after
the Foreign Ministers’ acceptance of the 1935 date for the beginning of the war
for Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Government took its first diplomatic initiative on
the war crimes question. On 22 July 1946 Ato Ambay despatched three almost
identical letters, addressed respectively to the UN Secretary-General, in New
York, the International Military Tribunal, in Berlin, and the British Legation,
in Addis Ababa.
These letters began by recalling that the Ethiopian Government had established
a War Crimes Commission, on 20 May, with “full authority for and
charged with the functions of assembling evidence of war crimes in Ethiopia
and of bringing and instituting charges and criminal proceedings against Italian
individuals who have committed major war crimes against Ethiopia and the
Ethiopian people.”
The letters then drew attention to the London Agreement, of 8 August 1945,
and to the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, to which Ethiopia
had adhered. Ambay stated that Ethiopia accordingly reserved “the right to