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SECURITY AND STATE BUILDING IN THE EXPERIENCE
OF THE ITALIAN TRUST ADMINISTRATION IN SOMALIA

Despite this very serious episode, the political and police directives, issued
and designed to prevent further similar tragedies, are rather balanced, prudent
and far-sighted, as can be inferred from a report sent to the Carabinieri General
Command by the Somalia Carabinieri Group on December 15, 1952 : the
(47)
Administration ordered the political-administrative and police authorities to act with the
utmost energy, not delaying the use of weapons, if necessary, against anyone who tried to
disturb public order. At the same time, it was recommended that any intervention by the force,

far from assuming the character of reprisals, should be contained within the limits of legality
and, despite all the pressure in this sense put forward by the Italians of Somalia,
it understood how absolutely inadvisable it was to declare the League outlawed, being a
movement that cannot be suppressed with police measures: as the experience of other African
countries demonstrates, where this has been done, the movement has flourished again more
vital and more dangerous than before.
On the other hand, the same author of the report, Lieutenant Colonel
Umberto Ripa di Meana, suggested that the League should not be considered solidly
involved in the responsibility for the sad facts of Chisimaio, attributable only to a group of
local extremists nor, therefore, should be nourished, with inopportune rigidities, the feeling that

all the members of the party are indiscriminately in a state of accusation. This would discou-
rage the tendency to collaborate with AFIS which also exists within the League and which
only a comprehensive and prudent policy bring advantageous results for the order and tran-
quility of the Territory and in the interest of the Italians residing here.
Therefore, both the political action and the informative work of the Arma
were oriented to approach the moderate fractions of the League and to isolate
the extremists: thus the episode of Chisimaio was read in the right sense, or as

falling, in terms of responsibility , more on local troublemakers than as a matter
of solidarity with the whole League, an interpretation, the latter, that would ine-
vitably compromise any attempt at settlement.
From a preventive point of view, the preparations deemed suitable were
demonstrative actions, such as marches and exercises in the vicinity of those
places where, through information activity, it was supposed that dangerous
concentrations of demonstrators could take place. In the event of an emergen-
cy, it was shrewdly foreseen that a first “shock”, or containment, nucleus was
composed of indigenous agents (so that the common national membership
could facilitate an extreme attempt at composition), while a second “heavy”

nucleus was composed of metropolitan Carabinieri.

(47) Rapporto n. 47/2 di prot. Ris.Pers. datato 15 dicembre 1952 del Gruppo CC Somalia al
Comando Generale CC avente ad oggetto “Disordini verificatisi in Chisimaio il 1° agosto
1952”, USCC, f. AFIS, fasc. 666.15.

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