article_snippet.sent: Libya is an example of the long reach of Italian imperialism.
article_snippet.sent: Libya was for a brief period an incorporated province of Italy, on the model of French Algeria, and Libyan families still feel the devastating effects of the fascist dictatorship's persecution of those who resisted Italian occupation.
article_snippet.sent: Over 100,000 Libyan men, women, and children were deported to concentration camps deep in the desert in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and much of the ruling class was exiled or executed.
article_snippet.sent: Col. Moammar Gadhafi, who ruled from 1969 to 2011, was born during the Italian occupation of Libya, and his identity as a revolutionary was shaped by the example of resistance leaders such as Omar al-Mukhtar, who was hanged by the fascists in front of 20,000 of his people in 1931.
article_snippet.sent: In 1970, soon after his took power, Gadhafi struck back, expelling the remaining Italian community in Libya.
article_snippet.sent: Some of those people had grown up entirely in Libya.
article_snippet.sent: This political intervention did not spell the end of Italian-Libyan commercial dealings, which grew out of colonial-era relations that had made Italy biggest oil supplier.
article_snippet.sent: Commercial concerns, and the cozy relationship of then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Gadhafi, also lay behind a historic 2008 Friendship Treaty between Italy and Libya, which promised infrastructure and other aid to Libya worth the equivalent of $5 billion as compensation for the damages inflicted by Italy during the decades of colonial rule.
article_snippet.sent: Until his death in 2011, despite deals with Italy and the European Union to control departures from his borders, Gadhafi intermittently used European fears of mass arrivals of migrants from Libya as a political weapon.
article_snippet.sent: Given Europe's geography, a political weapon was pointed particularly at Italy, Libya's former master, and the principal target of Gadhafi's post-colonial revenge politics.
article_snippet.sent: This climate has encouraged those who wish to rehabilitate the "heroes" of fascist imperialism.
article_snippet.sent: In 2012, the town of Affile built a publicly-funded memorial to General Rodolfo Graziani, known as "the butcher of Fezzan" for his brutal repression of Libyan resisters in the 1920s -- and for the massacre of Ethiopian civilians his ordered in response to a 1937 attempt on his life.