Page 198 - Rassegna 2021-3

OSSERVATORIO INTERNAZIONALE

5. Create an army, create a people, create a State
The impetus given to the recruitment of indigenous troops, launched
before the Trust Administration in Somalia, was certainly one of the cornersto-
nes of the action of the military component of the Italian administration and
was pursued methodically. Consistently with art. 3 and 6 of the agreement with
which the Trust Administration was delegated, the objective of proceeding
with recruitment among the local population was aimed at fulfilling the obliga-
tion of guaranteeing security and individual rights protection and, at the same
time, the commitment to provide the future Somali State with its own defense
and security apparatus. In building this apparatus, however, there was some-
thing else: the rather explicit possibility of overcoming the tribal fragmentation
in the dialectic of power and of associating members of the different clans in
a structure that, beyond conditioning political interests, deriving from affiliation
to a specific social formation or to another, were in a position to equally protect
all the different instances of the composite ethnic mosaic of which they were
an expression.
This commitment, among other things, allowed for significant savings,
reducing the contingent sent to Somalia by three metropolitan battalions and
(9)
was truly an extraordinary result, considering the obstacles that will be underli-
ned below. First of all, the reliability of the staff: going back to Somalia almost
ten years after the defeat in AOI (Italian East Africa), following which many of
the former askari, zaptié and dubat (respectively operating as soldiers, carabi-
nieri and border militia) had dispersed, had passed under British payroll, had
given themselves up to banditry or, more simply, had become too old for mili-
tary service.
This unavailability and inadequacy of our former colonial troops is clearly
expressed in a “confidential” report dated January 12, 1952, where, in highli-
ghting the need to implement troops training, Ferrara states: “Contrary to the
forecasts of those who handed over the territory to us, we managed to recon-
stitute the Somali departments with volunteers in a relatively short time.
These volunteers were our former graduates and askari and recruits. For
eleven years they didn’t carry out their professional activity. If they constituted
or constitute, in the bulk of the Security Corps, the autochthonous element
that revived our beautiful traditions of discipline and military honor (elements
therefore of fundamental importance for the moral solidity of the Somali
Units) they proved to be “inefficient” under a technical point of view and, for
the most part, not completely up to their duties, especially in the first months
(9) A. DEL BOCA, op.cit., pagg. 237-238.

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