The Libyan Genocide (Shar): 125,000-750,000 (jan 1, 1929 – nov 1, 1934)

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The Libyan Genocide (also known as Shar in Arabic, meaning "Evil") was carried out by Fascist Italy (Italian colonial forces under Benito Mussolini, primarily generals Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani) against the Libyan Arab population, particularly the Bedouin tribes of Cyrenaica between 1929 and 1934 (Cambridge World History of Genocide dates, though the broader Second Italo-Senussi War lasted 1923-1932), with an estimated death toll between 83,000 (Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Cambridge World History of Genocide, for Cyrenaica alone) and 500,000 (Ali Abdullatif Ahmida's higher estimate for the entire Italian colonial period 1911-1943), with other estimates ranging from 250,000-300,000 (United Nations estimate) to 750,000 (some historians).

The Italian colonial forces also engaged in forced deportations and death marches to concentration camps (110,000 civilians forcibly marched), mass executions, chemical weapons use (mustard gas in violation of 1925 Geneva Protocol), ethnic cleansing and forced displacement, systematic starvation (600,000 animals killed), confinement in 16-19 concentration camps with death rates of approximately 40-45%, torture, village destruction and burning, confiscation of land for Italian settler colonialism (with plans to settle 500,000-1,000,000 Italian settlers), barbed wire fencing (200-mile fence between Libya and Egypt), refusing to take prisoners of war and executing surrendering combatants, and cultural destruction.

It has been labeled as genocide by the Cambridge World History of Genocide (edited by Ben Kiernan, Wendy Lower, Norman Naimark, and Scott Straus), genocide scholar Ali Abdullatif Ahmida (whose 2020 book "Genocide in Libya: Shar, A Hidden Colonial History" won the L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize), Italian anti-fascist historians Angelo Del Boca, Giorgio Rochat and Eric Salerno, genocide scholars Melvin Page and Penny Sonneberg, and numerous international scholars who recognize it as meeting all criteria for genocide under a racist fascist colonial plan.

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