ITALY'S FEARFUL CRIME.

Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 348, 9 January 1912, Page 2

ITALY'S FEARFUL CRIME.

THE LIE DIRECT GIVEN TO THE ITALIAN PREMIER

BY COURAGEOUS WAR CORRESPONDENTS.

When the gruesome details of the abominations perpetrated m the oasis outside of Tripoli by the Italian army were first published Signor ■ Gjolitti threw grave doubts on the veracity of the correspondents at the front. Reuter's representative, Mr Davis ( c Morning Post'),' and Mr Grant ('Daily Mirror ') jointly made a declaration that they were prepared to swear to the absolute truthfulness of their story, and this is what they had tb say about .sfe, —Their Fearful Ride— tjpfljbtober 27, foufr days after the pSjTK^K of the oasis began. They saw a||y|ap of corpses— f rom 50 to 70 men anjlglboys— piled on. one another m a space 15 yards wide by five deep. They saw the body, of a very old man lying on the road. Every few yards they saw fresh corpses. Some of them had' been bayoneted v clubbed to death with the butt end of rifles. They saw two dead Jews. During x the ride of two miles they saw not a single living Arab — man, woman, or. child. They saw a second pile of corpses — about 50 men and boys, who had been shot en masse. Some had been bayoneted or slashed with swords. One man had his head smashed in — a wound that could only have been inflicted by the butt end -of a rifle. . " ' > '

— Massacred m Cold Blood.—

These 'correspondents saw six men shot m cold blood. One was a peculiarly infamous case. A very old Arab had, been sitting most of. the afternoon on a wall. The soldiers shot him as he sat with his head bowed. Another Arab was taken- out of bis house and shot before the eyes of his wife. Ho was left to die like, a* dog on tho roadside. Three unarmed Arabs, clad m clean, white robes— men of ; high class, peaceful, and well-to-do owners -of property m. the oasis-^— were taken into a cottage and shot against a Avail. It is beyond doubt that these cases are typical of what went oh throughout the Red Oasis during the Italian Terror. It was an indiscriminate butchery. The i floodgates of blood arid lust were opened by General Caneva, and his troops wallowed m carnage. '• , —Explaining it Away.— A week later the. correspondent of 'The Times,' . who supplied the foregoing details, wrote to his journal: — "The telegram as it reached you represents me jo have said that, 'the floodgates of blood and lust were opened.' > This is not as I intended the sentence to read, as I wrote 'bloodlust' as a ''compound word. As far as my experience went of the ' terrible retribution, exacted by the Italian troops, there was no war upon women *m any sense of the phrase; The blame that should be placed at the door of the Italians, is, that, with no experience in-similar^ matters, they set about a dedicate military operation without . the proper control of their weapon of . repression." . . : — The ipSdeousness of War. — The following passages are taken verbatim from a private letter written by Mr Grant; the 'Daily Mirror's ' correspondent j to his relatives m London:— ■■....;■ ...

•.•■.,-'• • Well, we are having stirring times here, and I am thoroughly enjoying the excitement ; but I4m also seeing the hideousness of war— the cold-blooded killing of hundreds of Arabs, many of them, perfectly innocent and taking no part m the hostilities. I believe 4,000 Arabs have been shot m. the last few days, including some women and children. Francis M'Cullagh (' Westminster „. Gazette') . arid Herr Gottberg I' 1 (' Lokal Anzeigfer ') have sent back their <jards to General Caneva with a letter as strong as they could make it, calling the army "a band of assassins "..etc. Ashmead 1^ Bartlett (fteuter), Davis (' Morning Post '), and «>Jf >j have drawn up a statement sent it* to the English Consul j ribing some 'of the ■■ things 'we , ally saw- I expect that M'Cullagh and Gottberg will be expelled for the General andy the army, but they don't care.-

—A Credit to Their Craft

War correspondents, as a rule, arc , not squeamish^ but the butchery they witnessed was too much for Messrs • M'Cullagh and Gottberg, who were so disgusted with jvhat ihef saw that they handed their- passes to the Italian Gommander-iri-Chief, and refused to have any further dealings with the Italian army. In no dither w&r' have correspondents returned 'to their homes f^wch reasons. Here are some points i^ffl:i,M^My3ullaKh^s ; remarkable des^Ecn,' whose dignified protest was - umquo m the history of Avar correspondents":— ' ..■; .-■•-.. ■•••*.■-..

" As a protest against the .murder of innocent Arab women* children, and men I returned my official papers as a war correspondent to General Canqva. About 400 men and women have been shot,, and 4,000, whei-eof not 100 were cuilty. Cripples and blind beggars have been deliberately shot: sick people, whose houses were burned, w£releft on the ground and refused even a. drop of water. I personally witnessed scenes; of horror arid photographed tho'm. There has noT been the faintest pretence of justice. The Arab quarter was by crazy soldiers armed with revolvers, who were shooting overv 'Arab man and woman they met. The officers were worse than the men, and the army sfre demoralised. On returning ttft' papers I was summoned to headquarters, but I refused to consider any GomTßunication except through < the Cfonsul^ and. no further attempt was' mads ;tp communicate w^ith me. . . . The facts of the massacre are beyond dispute. The Consuls have already informed their Governments; The scenes = arc worse than any Russian ppgram or Armenian massacre. pro-Italian Jews^ >vere massacred by mistake among the? Arabs. * The Arabs : did mutilate corpses, but not till after the Italians ? began ihoinassacres. The Arabs were v at_ first . most courteous opponents, Tmnginp:. m the Italian wounded under a flag of trupe;/ ; ; " ' '

Weak Commander.—

.. " General, Caheya is to blame for haying let loose- a Mghly excitable army on the civil population with a free hand to, kill whom they, liked; without any effort to distinguish ; innocent from guilty. It is the General, not the army, who is to; blame, and he must bear the full responsibility which, must attach to this afrair^The General lives m. the citadel,, fortified and surrounded with 'sandbags ami? bicteib'-ptoof shelters, with soldiers on tHe fl^pf r and m the cellar. The general of division does the Game. Under Ruch absentee leadership any army would be de^nerate. General

Caneva is never seen at the front or outside his bomb-proof shelter. He persists m regarding the Arabs as noncombatants, who fight at their own risk. He says that he is fighting Turkey, and the Arabs therefore are not regular soldiers m uniform, and must be shot if caught with arms m their possession, whether under the whito flag or no." [General Caneva was recalled, but he ought} if these statements be true, 46 nave been cashiered —Ed. E.S.]

— Chorus of Condemnatory Comment.—

-"If we had a Palmerston, a Beaconsfield, or a Salisbury at Downing Street (wrote the ' Standard) we imagine that England would, put . herself: at the head of the movement, and intimate to Italy that it is high time she_ made an end of a transaction which is particularly inconvenient to us, since it . is rousing the whole Mohammedan world into a deep and very natural resentment against the Christian ethics and-politics that can produce such deplorable results. And as Britain has more Mohammedan subjects than any other State we are the most clearly concerned m this aspect of the matter. . . • . Of what use is it that Europe should sit down periodically at The Hague to mitigate the horrors of war and attempt t;j civilise slaughter? These codes of regularised murder, these rules, of coldblooded mercy, of what meaning ara they if a civilised Power may* without penalty or remonstrance, defy every commpn instinct of pity? Sir Edward Grey would speak the opinion, not of our country alone, but of Europe, {i he were to censure these abominations."

" Rejoicing m her new pride (remarks the 'Socialist Review'), Italy has doffed head mantles and colored petticoats, and is become a fine, modern, imperial lady. She has bestowed upon herself a huge army and navy, and goes out to dine and play at cards with the swell European Powers. In characteristic imperial fashion she celebrates her conquest of the high society of the bourgeois States by exciting herself tp suppress her banditti at home while she herself plunges into filibustering expeditions abroad. . . . There is .really no conceivable canon of morality or ' international equity which can justify a civilised Power m making the misgoveniment of the territory of another nation an excuse for stealing it." ' Punch,' m a clever cartoon entitled ' The Euphemisms of Massacre,' had Turkey apostrophising thus: "When I was charged with this kind of thing m Bulgaria nobody excused me on the ground of Military Exigencies."