November 5, 1911: A decree by the King of Italy declares Libya Italian, even before conquering it

On November 5, 1911, King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy signed a decree placing Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, modern-day Libya, under the "full and entire sovereignty" of the Kingdom of Italy, according to EBSCO research notes. Through this text, Rome laid claim to a territory that its soldiers did not yet control.

A decree signed before the conquest

The Italian ultimatum to the Ottoman Empire was issued on September 28, 1911, with the declaration of war following the next day. Tripoli was bombed on October 3. A month later, annexation was proclaimed while the Italian army held little more than a few coastal towns, notes the World History Encyclopedia. The Ottoman Empire would not cede Libya until the Treaty of Ouchy, near Lausanne, on October 18, 1912.

The first testing ground for aerial warfare

It was over these lands that military aviation was born. On October 23, 1911, Captain Carlo Piazza flew over Ottoman lines: the first aerial reconnaissance in history. A few days later, Second Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti dropped four grenades on Tajoura and Ain Zara, in what is considered the first aerial bombardment ever carried out; Wikipedia oscillates between October 30 and November 1, 1911. The first bombs dropped from an airplane onto human beings were dropped on Africans.

Sciara Sciat, then the camps

On October 23, 1911, more than 500 Italian soldiers were killed at Sciara Sciat, on the outskirts of Tripoli. The very next day, the troops turned against the civilians. Estimates vary from one Wikipedia entry to another: 400 women and 4,000 men shot or hanged here, about 10,000 dead in reprisals there.

The resistance would hold out for twenty years. Omar al-Mukhtar, a Senussi sheikh born in 1858, led it until his capture and hanging on September 16, 1931. To put an end to it, Fascist Italy deported more than 100,000 inhabitants of Cyrenaica to camps, notably in Soluq and El Agheila, and used mustard gas, which had been banned since 1925. The death tolls remain debated, according to works cited by Wikipedia: 40,000 deaths among the internees (Duggan), 40,000 to 70,000 total Libyan deaths (Del Boca), and at least 80,000 up to a third of the population of Cyrenaica (Mann).

Italy did not renounce its colonies until the Paris Peace Treaty in 1947; Libya became independent in 1951. Rome offered an apology in July 1998, then signed a friendship treaty in Benghazi on August 30, 2008, providing $5 billion in goods and services in exchange for Libyan measures targeting emigration.

Key takeaways

Colonization can begin with a signature: a royal decree was enough, on November 5, 1911, to declare Libya Italian before any conquest. Twenty years of resistance and tens of thousands of deaths followed, the price of which is still being negotiated between Tripoli and Rome.