An Italian Communist in the Ethiopian Resistance
On April 25, Italians celebrate liberation from Fascism. One leading partisan was Ilio Barontini, a Communist who helped lead Ethiopia’s resistance against Benito Mussolini’s colonial occupation.
Portrait of Ilio Barontini. (Wikimedia Commons)
Giuseppe Di Vittorio drew the curtains and turned on the large chandelier, two of whose bulbs were out. The drafts from the windows let in the bitter cold of that evening in December 1938. The meeting room at the Italian Communists’ exile HQ in Paris soon filled up.
First to arrive was Ethiopia’s representative to the League of Nations, Lorenzo Taezaz. Then there was a large and noisy French delegation: Georges Mandel, recently appointed Minister of the Colonies; his chief of staff, André Diethelm; the Radical Party’s Pierre Cot, a politician who had good relations with Communist organizations and had been trade minister in the second Popular Front government; and Colonel Paul Robert Monnier of the Deuxième Bureau, France’s military intelligence service.
In front of the other Communist leaders, Di Vittorio outlined the mission headed for Ethiopia. He said that he had recruited a dozen experts during his time in Spain, but that three or four fighters would be setting off for Ethiopia.
The militants who Di Vittorio chose were surely plucky, but also men of inventiveness and imagination. They were the type able to get themselves out of tricky situations — and to cope with a hostile and treacherous environment. The three militants chosen were Ilio Barontini, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War; Anton Ukmar; and Domenico Bruno Rolla, who had been involved in the painful retreat from Spain. Mandel said he was willing to make available all the channels Paris had open with the Ethiopian resistance. Colonel Monnier confirmed that the Deuxième Bureau and even the British stationed in Sudan had already established direct contacts with the Ethiopian ras (chief, or duke) Kassa Haile Darge and Abebe Aregai.
In Spain
The first to leave, at the end of 1938, was Ilio Barontini, the hero of the Battle of Guadalajara, together with another comrade, Paolo De Bargili, a man ever in the shadows who operated under the pseudonym Paul Langlois. The partisan who was appointed vice emperor of Ethiopia was Barontini, born in Cecina, Tuscany, in 1890. Persecuted by the Fascists, he fled in 1931, joined the clandestine apparatus of Italy’s Communist Party (PCd’I) in Paris, moved to the Soviet Union, followed Mao Zedong in the Long March, and in 1936, was sent to fight in Spain.
Although renowned as a hero, Barontini had long breathed in the spirit of the port city of Livorno, and had always shown a certain intolerance for political and military “discipline.” Manfred Stern, commander in chief of the International Brigades, even called him a coward. He replied in his own way: on September 24, 1937, after waiting two hours in torrential rain, he ordered the troops, returning from the second unsuccessful offensive in Aragon and lined up awaiting inspection by Lieutenant Colonel Casado, commander of the XII Army Corps, Commander Vernal, and the political commissar of the 21st Army Corps, to retreat to their quarters in Castelnou. We can only imagine what Barontini said to his men, soaked to the skin: “These idiots’ve really fucked me off, let’s get out of here!”
Barontini spent a month in isolation in Paris before embarking on the journey that would take him to Ethiopia via Egypt and Sudan, with Emperor Haile Selassie’s credentials written on silk handkerchiefs to prevent the enemy from seeing them. In summer 1939, Barontini was joined by Anton Ukmar, a Slovenian ex-railwayman from Gorizia (annexed to Italy in 1920) whom he had met in Spain. There was also Bruno Rolla, an anti-fascist from La Spezia, Colonel Monnier of the Deuxième Bureau, and the negus’s (Ethiopian emperor’s) secretary Lorenzo Taezaz.
Voice of the Abyssinians
Having invaded Ethiopia in October 1935, Benito Mussolini’s forces had conquered the most important villages and cities, the Addis Ababa–Djibouti railway, and the main communication routes with the use of mustard gas. Yet, a considerable part of the territory was still in the hands of the Arbegnuoc, the Ethiopian patriots. Barontini found it difficult to bring together the various local ras and therefore asked for help from the negus, in exile in London, who appointed him his deputy.
Thus, armed with the imperial scepter, the Communist from Livorno kept a handle on the local ras. On this basis, he organized an army of some 250,000 resistance fighters, using the tactic of small offensive groups of fifteen to twenty fighters to attack the fascist forts, carried out important missions, and published a bilingual newspaper, La voce degli Abissini (the Voice of the Abyssinians) — becoming a legend.
When the three Italians met for the first time in Gojjam, northwestern Ethiopia, there was a long embrace. They had not seen each other since their ill-fated escape from Spain. Rolla and Ukmar laughed as they found Barontini dressed up like some colonial explorer. The village chief proposed that the spoils of the last expedition — a dozen oxen taken from animal thieves as they attempted to ford a river — be used for a welcome party. He then led the guests to the tucul (round house) and ordered his two or perhaps three daughters to wash the feet of Rolla, Ukmar, and Monnier as a sign of hospitality.
The three men were stunned, but Barontini grimaced, as if to say they should accept without too much hesitation. The rhythmic gestures of the three young women seemed like a ritual that the Europeans were certainly not used to, but it cannot be said that, apart from surprise, they did not also feel pleasure, especially after the hardships of the long journey. The party lasted until late at night, with the camp smelling of burned fat and spices. The meat was put on skewers and distributed slightly cooked, cut directly into large slices and savored with the classic berberé (spice mix) of chili pepper and herbs, devoured with pieces of injera (soft, sour flatbread). Then everyone toasted with tej (honey wine).
Barontini and the others tried to slip away from the feast to finalize their plans, but they were immediately called back by the rebels. So, when the three days of celebration ended, still a little dazed, they decided how to divide up the areas of activity. Barontini remained in Gojjam, Ukmar and Rolla went to the Gondar area, around Lake Tana and the Upper Blue Nile, and Monnier to the Harar region, in eastern Ethiopia. The French officer died on November 11, 1939, in Gantola, but not before discovering the house in Harar where his favorite poet, Arthur Rimbaud, whose books he kept in his bag, had lived from 1880 to 1884. To better relate to the Ethiopian guerrillas, the three Italians took biblical names: Rolla was Petrus, Barontini was Paulus, and Ukmar was Johannes. The mission ended in June 1940, when the three anti-fascists set out on their return journey amid disease and attacks by marauders. Once again, Barontini devised a plan to escape.
Escape
They miraculously found themselves alive in Khartoum, where they took the only photograph showing all three of them together. Back in Europe, Barontini organized the resistance, first in France and then in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, and participated in the liberation of Bologna. In 1946, he became a member of the Constituent Assembly for the Italian Communist Party in the Pisa and Livorno constituency and, in 1948, he was elected to the Senate of the Republic, where he was secretary of the Defense Committee. He was also named an honorary citizen of the city of Bologna, decorated by the Allied forces with the Bronze Star Medal, and by the Soviet Union with the Order of the Red Star.
He died in a car accident in Scandicci in 1951 at the age of sixty, on his way to Florence to convey the greetings of the Livorno Communists to the Florentine federation of the party, together with two other prominent leaders, Otello Frangioni and Leonardo Leonardi. On his return to France, Ukmar was interned in Vernet d’Ariège and then in Castres, from where he escaped on September 8, 1943.
He joined the resistance in Venezia Giulia and in 1944 was sent by the Communist Party leadership to Genoa, where he became commander of the VI Ligurian Operational Zone of the Garibaldi partisans based in Carrega Ligure, in the province of Alessandria. He participated in the liberation of Genoa, and was awarded honorary citizenship of the city of the Lanterna, as well as the US Bronze Star, the Italian government’s Gold Medal for the Resistance, and other awards from the Yugoslav government.
On his return from Africa in March 1940, Rolla was interned in the French camp of Vernet d’Ariege. He attempted to return to Italy but was arrested at Ponte Unione, in Menton, on April 5, 1944, and transferred to the jail in La Spezia under the Fascist regime’s Special Tribunal. On July 24, he was taken to Rome’s Regina Coeli prison, but, in early 1944, he managed to escape and reach Avezzano in Abruzzo, where he participated in the Resistance as a political commissar under the name “Carlo.” After the war, he returned to La Spezia and joined the provincial secretariat of the Italian Communist Party as head of organization and then the national leadership of the party. He died on June 9, 1954, at the age of forty-six. He is buried in the cemetery of Baccano, in the province of La Spezia.
There are only a few sources allowing us to reconstruct this history. When Barontini died in Scandicci, there was talk of a diary he had written about his experiences in Ethiopia, but it was never found.
“He told us that he had written in his memoirs about this story and the fact that he had even found an Ethiopian Communist. It must have been a fascinating story: after his death, we searched all over Italy for the manuscript. We never found it, so we were left wondering whether he had really written it. Every effort was made, but none of the women who could have had it in their possession— and there were many, which made the search embarrassing and difficult— was able to find it,” wrote Giancarlo Pajetta in his Il ragazzo rosso.
Rolla also died at age forty-six without writing any memoirs. The only person to leave any testimony of the events in Ethiopia was Ukmar: a typewritten report of twelve pages deposited in the Gramsci Institute archives, another preserved in the regional archives of Capodistria, various interviews and conversations, and an authorized biography, Ukmar (Miro). Storia di un rivoluzionario, edited by Rastko Bradaskja. For him too, it is a mosaic that is difficult to piece together, given his attachment to the party and his thousand lives of illegal activity under myriad pseudonyms.