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To undertake such a program, the crucial thing was to be in possession of the expensive animals, which were acquired immediately from the flock the Halle institute exhibited at the Milan Pelt Fair. In addition, Maiocco traveled in the summer of 1931 to Germany, where he not only visited the major German Karakul breeders but also stayed at Halle to become acquainted with Gustav Frölich’s work in crossing Karakul with European breeds.[88] In subsequent years, the journal Coniglicoltura would offer detailed accounts of the growth of the Istituto Nazionale de Coniglicoltura’s Karakul flock, celebrating the fine qualities of the newborn lambs. From the first small group formed from the imports from Halle, the herd increased in 1940 to 130 pureblood Karakul sheep.[89] The plans for Karakul were also becoming more and more ambitious.

The original reasons for importing Karakul to Italy were to cross them with local breeds such as leccese-moscia and to establish Karakul farms in the impoverished areas of the Mezzogiorno (Puglia, Calabria, and Campania). But in the 1930s, because of the desire to settle the empire with peasants from the overpopulated regions of Italy, diverting migration headed for the Americas to the Italian possessions in Africa would progressively become a policy of the Fascist regime.[90] Fascist ideologues bragged again and again that Italian colonialism was entirely distinct in nature from the imperial undertakings of the “plutocratic powers,” particularly the British Empire, in that the rationale of the enterprise was not capitalist greed but the establishment of settler colonies to absorb the Italian population surplus.[91] In other words, Italian exceptionalism was to be derived from the frontier experience. Not only was white settlement not exceptional; it was well in tune with other fascist regimes’ expansionist ambitions.

The raising of Karakul offered a hope of reproducing the German miracle in South West Africa by producing wealth, in the form of furs, out of the desert while sustaining a proud settler community. Of course, as previously with the German colonial experience, desert regions that were useless in the eyes of the colonizer presented a more complex reality to those inhabiting them. The establishment of brave Italian settlers on the new Italian frontier was also to be preceded by a violent story of genocide—one of the most violent stories of Mussolini’s regime.

Italian atrocities during the pacification campaign in eastern Libya in 1930–1932, with ruthless use of air power and brutal military tactics against civilian populations, were objects of open disapproval in the international press of the day.[92] Nevertheless, the myth of a benign form of Italian colonialism tolerant of local costumes has proved hard to debunk. But Giorgio Rochat, Angelo del Boca, Nicola Labanca, and Alberto Sbacchi have been responsible for producing a decisive change in our understanding of Italian colonial practices.[93] They have detailed the grim realities of the sixteen concentration camps that operated between 1930 and 1933 in the Cyrenaica region, in the eastern half of present-day Libya. According to Nicola Labanca’s account, nearly 100,000 people of the nomadic and semi-nomadic populations—that is, roughly half the population of eastern Libya—were forced to settle in the camps.[94] Punishment, execution, and death by starvation were daily occurrences. Only 60,000 came out alive. In fact, Governor Pietro Badoglio, in a decision shared with the fascist leaders Benito Mussolini and Rodolfo Graziani, didn’t leave any doubts about his intentions:

Above all, we need to create a wide and very precise territorial separation between the rebellious groups and the subjected population. I do not hide the importance or the gravity of this measure that will mean the ruin of the so-called subjected population. But by now the path has been mapped out for us, and we must pursue it until the end, even if the whole population of Cyrenaica were to die.[95]

The rebellious groups that Badoglio was pointing at were the members of the Sanusiya order of Sufis in Cyrenaica.[96] The problem was how to grab land from the Islamic order to settle Italian peasants. While in the western parts of the colony—Tripolitania—Italians had been able to take directly the lands under control of the previous Ottoman administration, in the east—Cyrenaica—the Sanusi pious endowments—the waqf—made up the largest portion of fertile lands. The Sanusiya order had attached its own history and authority to the landscape, with “shared spaces (from madrassas to date groves) marked by the enactment of rituals, the names of saints, and the complex customs that regulated mixed waqf property.”[97] This meant that any transfer of lands would also imply a break from Sanusiya religious practices and social order. Before the fascists came to power, Italians recognized the limits of their ability to control the territory and respected the spiritual nature of the waqf, with the colonial administration thus sharing actual sovereignty over the Bedouin population with the Sanusiya. But with the fascist regime and its grandiose settlement visions came also the need for a takeover of Sanusiya assets. Badoglio, when assuming the control of colonial government in 1929, set the tone:

Inhabitants of Cyrenaica listen, listen! If I am forced to wage war I will do it systematically and by powerful means, and it will be remembered. No rebel will have truce, neither him, nor his family, nor his animals, nor his descendants. I will destroy everything, men and things.[98]

And so he did. By 1932 all members of the Sanusi family were either dead, captives, or in exile, and the Bedouin population that supported them had been reduced almost by half, their entire stock destroyed. As in South West Africa, the emphasis was put on destroying nomadic life built around animals to be replaced by brave white settlers. The best lands of Cirenayca—70,000 hectares of waqf— were confiscated by colonial administration and delivered to the Ente di Colonizazzione della Cirenaica, a settlement agency created in 1932.[99] That didn’t deter Italians from claiming a special relation to Islam while asserting their respect for local costumes. Not only did the Duce, during his visit to Libya in 1937, invoke the “sword of Islam,” promising to be the protector of the religion; settlement plans also included villages for indigenous peoples in which the building of mosques proved Italian good intentions. But what at first sight may contribute to the image of Italy as a benign colonial power should be seen as a movement to limit religious practices to confined spaces, eliminating the spiritual dimensions that local populations attached to the Cyrenaican landscape.[100] Structures built as a mimesis of indigenous practices actually denied these by developing a domesticized version of Islam serving colonial relations. Perhaps the first denouncer of such reality was no other than the famous anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who was mobilized during World War II by the British Army to spur Sanusi resistance against Italians. Certainly not a neutral observer, Evans-Pritchard detailed how the Italian presence had been responsible for what later authors would call a genocide among the Sanusi, which added to the large-scale killings a total disruption of local life and related religious costumes through land seizure.

After 1933, with the appointment as governor of Italo Balbo, one of the most popular figures among the Fascist leadership, Italian settlement projects would gain new impetus, culminating in the dramatic Veintemila episode. In 1938, Balbo organized in grand style a fleet of seventeen ships that brought in about 20,000 colonists to occupy the 26 new model villages designed by Italian planners.[101] He fashioned himself the general of an “army of rural infantry,” commanding “the rural masses… moving in compact formations, perfectly organized, to take on the grand work of colonization” and that contrasted with the disorganized emigration fluxes of previous generations.[102] Settlers selected from the populations of overpopulated regions of Italy had cardboard labels sewed to their clothes, each color coding a person’s destination in Libya. In 1939, while Hitler was invading Poland, conquering land for German settlers who were organized in similar terms by the SS Race and Settlement Office, Balbo brought 10,000 new settlers into the Libyan colony. E. J. Russell, the director of the Rothamsted Experimental Station, described the undertaking as “far the largest group settlement ever undertaken its progress,” asserting that the Balbo’s initiative would be “watched with the deepest interest by all concerned with colonization, and certainly by many administrators in the British Empire.”[103]