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

Italian Fascist War Crimes in Ethiopia 119
applicable as of October 1935. Farquher was left with the understanding that
the Foreign Office wanted him to keep out of the issue as far as he could.
Ethiopian Approach to the UN War Crimes Commission
The Ethiopian War Crimes Commission meanwhile had begun pre l i m i n a r y
re s e a rches. Ato Ambay reported this to the UN War Crimes Commission, on 31
December 1946. He stated that there we re “a p p a rently no difficulties at all” in
obtaining sufficient evidence to justify the trial of Badoglio, for his “violations
of the Laws of Wa r, especially the intensive use of poison-gas,” and of Gra z i a n i ,
for “crimes against humanity, especially the great Graziani massacre in Fe b r u a r y
1937.” As re g a rd other Italian officials, the investigation and re c o rding of ev i-
dence could be “c o n s i d e red as complete,” and their cases would be presented to
the UN Commission, as soon as the necessary translations we re made. 5 5
The UN Commission’s Reaction to Ethiopian Action
Ambay’s letter served to highlight a major policy contradiction which had by
now developed. This was that the Italian Peace Treaty, then about to be signed,
provided for the trial by the Ethiopian Government of Italians guilty of war
crimes, from 3 October 1935, while the UN Commission, under British influence,
had defined such trials as outside its competence.
This contradiction prompted Dr J. Litowski, the commission’s Legal Officer,
a Pole, to circulate a note, on 20 January 1947, apparently designed to resist
Ethiopian prosecutions of Italian war criminals on the basis of the Italian Peace
Treaty. Litowski recalled the commission’s original British-inspired resolution,
of 31 July 1946, which had stated that the commission could “find no evidence”
that it was “the wish of member Governments that the Committee should deal
with crimes committed in any other war,” and that the said governments were
“not in a possession of any evidence” of “any connection” between “the Italo-
Abyssinian war and the present war.”
Litowski, apparently reluctant to accept the principles embodied in the
Italian Draft Treaty, commented on 20 January 1947 that should the commission’s
resolution “remain in force”—and he seems to have assumed, and hoped,
that it would - the decision should be “brought to the attention of the Ethiopian