The Forgotten Genocide in Libya

On the occasion of Indigenous People’s Day, Professor Ali Abdullatif Ahmida sheds light of the forgotten genocide in Libya that took place between 1929 and 1934. Ahmida relies on the oral testimonies of Libyan survivors who lost their lives to the fascist Italian regime and were brutalized by deportations and internments. These Libyans were forcibly removed from their homes, marched across vast tracks of deserts and mountains, and confined behind barbed wire in 16 concentration camps. It is a story that Libyans have recorded in their oral histories and narratives, but their accounts remained hidden from global view. It took Professor Ahmida ten years of fieldwork and research to document the history of this forgotten genocide.

Biography

Ali Abdullatif Ahmida is Professor of Political Science at the University of New England, USA. He was born in Waddan, Libya and educated at Cairo University in Egypt and the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the founding Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of New England. Dr. Ahmida is the author of numerous articles and is the author of The Making of Modern Libya (2009), Forgotten Voices: Power and Agency in Colonial and Postcolonial Libya (2005), Post-Orientalism: Critical Reviews of North African Social and Cultural History (in Arabic, 2009), and The Libya We Do Not Know (in Arabic, 2014). He edited Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib (2000), and Bridges Across the Sahara (2009). His most recent book, Genocide in Libya (2021), is the subject of this lecture.

Assigned Reading

Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Genocide in Libya (Routledge, 2021)