ITALIANS IN LIBYA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 June 1940, Page 9

ITALIANS IN LIBYA

MASS COLONISATION SCHEME

FASCIST EXPERIMENT. BIG COST TO THE STATE. “It was a kind of sober gold-rush, in which every prospector knew that he would find ore. but knew also that he would have to refine it with his own hand." So Mr Martin Moore describes the great experiment of the mass-colonisation of Libya in “Fourth Shore." which he, as correspondent of the “Daily Telegraph," studied at first hand. He was with the first convoy of peasants—2o.ooo of them —who travelled to Libya in the autumn of 1938, to cultivate again the granary of Imperial Rome. He followed the long line of colonists, an entire family in each lorry, from the disembarkation port of Tripoli and Benghazi to their new homes; andrite visited the experimental farms which have proved that the irrigated desert, if it does not blossom as the rose, can at any rate produce a great variety of crops. "These farms,” he writes, “were the most strikingly fertile of any I visited. Their greenness almost glittered in the drab desert.”

SUBSIDISED SETTLERS. Quite apart from its agricultural interest, and setting aside any questions of the political necessities which forced Italy to embark on the scheme, this Fascist experiment is undoubtedly one of the most important and least known of contemporary events. As Mr Moore says, it is “radically different from the haphazard colonisation which people the British Empire and America. The pioneering, the restless push into the unknown, the spectacular success, the unspectacular failure of individuals —all these are absent from the Libyan scheme. The Fascist State does not content itself with shipping the migrant to his new land, finding him a job and leaving him to ‘make good’ as best he may. It provides him and his whole family with a farm, a home and furniture: tells them what they shall plant and sow; supplies seed and stock; buys all the produce of the farm; advances money for all immediate needs; and finally, over a long period of years, enables the peasant to purchase his holding and become at last the outright owner of a stake in the new country.”

THE FAMILY UNIT. The units of this “demographic colonisation” is the family—for there must be no hired labour, no employment of penniless newcomers by established colonists, no play of competition and no economic struggle. The plan was drawn up by Balbo, the Governor-Gen-eral of Libya, and approved by Mussolini in the March of 1938. By October the first 1800 families were on their way. There was no compulsion. Apart from those whose applications had to be turned down at first sight, 6000 families were actually examined by the travelling “selection committees.” “The tests which then weeded out 4200 applications were severe. To merit a Libyan farm a family had to be numerous, it had to be healthy—and it had to be staunchly Fascist.” Each family cost the State over £2OOO to transport and settle. This extension overseas of Italy’s great fourteen-year plan, which, begun in 1928 to bring into -cultivation millions of acres of derelict land at the cost of £70,000,000, actually cost the State and the settlement organisations a combined s»m of £4,100,000 before the first colonist stepped ashore and “for at least the first year the colonist is entirely a liability.” But that it shows every sign of being not only magnificently successful but of leading the way to a new conception of colonisation no one who reads this first-hand account can doubt.