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OSSERVATORIO INTERNAZIONALE

Italian foreign policy, consequently, pursued all possibilities, allowing a
glimpse of the risks possibly deriving from a hasty autonomy of its colonies,
which could quickly fall into the Soviet sphere of influence, the economic
consequences on reconstruction and emigration, the possibility that the
African exiles, if not re-channeled, could have fallen prey to pro-Soviet senti-
ments, fueling hypothetical risks for the security and stability of the nascent
Republic.
This work, on the other hand, was made easier by the political line of
Moscow oriented, in this regard, without particular caution, to gain consent to
the PCI in the phase immediately preceding the elections of 1948 and by the
impact on Italian and international public opinion of the massacre of
Mogadishu, as a result of which 68 were killed and 98 wounded between
Italians and Somalis, which occurred on 11 January 1948, following cross
demonstrations in support or against the entrustment of the trust administra-
tion on the occasion of a visit by the four-party commission of the UN, which
had to evaluate the overall local situation in order to express an opinion on the
assignment of the trust administration.
The Soviet pressure, moreover, provoked the Anglo-American fear that
an excessive stiffening of the Italian aspirations could have disadvantaged the
Liberal and Christian Democratic parties, while from the investigations into
the responsibility for the massacre it emerged, first of all, a guilty British
acquiescence to the excesses of the Somali faction in favor of immediate inde-
pendence and the inability of the British Military Administration to ensure
effective law enforcement.
A first plan agreed with the British, which substantially would have
rewarded a good part of the Italian expectations, the so-called Bevin-
Sforza compromise, named after the two Ministers of Foreign Affairs,
providing for the subdivision of Libya into three areas, with the Italian
administration only for Tripolitania, the administration on the integrity of
Somalia and the loss of Eritrea, dismembered at favor of Sudan and
Ethiopia, was rejected by the United Nations Assembly, for only one unfa-
vorable vote from Haiti.
The Italian government therefore had to conform its objectives to a
more realistic approach, accepting only the recognition of the trust admini-
stration on Somalia, where Italy was called to return for a decade in order to
gradually prepare its former colony for definitive independence through the
union with British Somaliland. Thus originated the Italian Trust
Administration in Somalia.

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