Reporting of Federici Studies Center
They were 300.000 the rapes of women, Italian men and children made by 1943 al ‘44 slab truppe coloniali del Corp Expeditionnaire Français. That page reopens history
Our newspaper had announced it 6 last March and the Association of Victims of the Marocchinate chaired by Emiliano Ciotti filed, through the law firm of the lawyer. Luciano Randazzo, formal complaint against France for the atrocities committed by French colonial troops against Italian civilians during the last war. The act was presented at the Prosecutor's Office of Frosinone and Latina, at the Military Prosecutor's Office in Rome, the General Headquarters of the Carabinieri and the French Embassy.
They were 300.000 the rapes of women, Italian men and children made by 1943 to '44 by the colonial troops of the Cef (French Expeditionary Corp) established for the 60% from Moroccans, Algerians and Senegalese and the rest by French Europeans, for a total of 111.380 men. Such violence was often followed by unimaginable torture and brutal murders, and of the victims, and of all those who attempted to oppose it. There were also so many cases of venereal diseases and infections that they constituted a real health emergency, as results from the parliamentary interpellation of the communist deputy Maria Maddalena Rossi in April 1952.
The first violence occurred after the landing in Sicily, where the North Africans of the 4th tabor raped women and children near Capizzi. After the breakthrough of the Gustav Line, in Ciociaria the peak of aberration was reached, but the violence continued as far as Tuscany. It was therefore not about the "only" 50 hours of complete impunity granted to the goumiers, as reported in the proclamation of their general Juin, but for a whole year.
According to the complaint, “It appears incontrovertible that no initiative has ever been adopted by the Italian State in order to request the punishment of the Moroccan soldiers for crimes against humanity committed on Italian territory, in particular in the province of Frosinone and Latina".
The complaint explicitly requests that any surviving culprits be traced to the Union Nationale des anciens combatants marocains and that they be tried for crimes against humanity and war crimes according to the international regulations introduced after the Nuremberg Protocols. It is also requested that the complaint be sent to the International Court of Human Rights to assess whether specific crimes against the French state exist.
About that, our previous article had revealed that General de Gaulle himself had been present – together with his War Minister Diethelm – in the places where the violence culminated. Various photographs demonstrate that he was staying in a hamlet of the municipality of Esperia (where the worst atrocities occurred) at the farmhouse of Baron Rosselli. He couldn't not have known.
Furthermore, there would be the fact that the division generals of the CEF : Guillaume, Know, by Monsabert, Brosset and Dody not only did nothing to prevent the violence, but they purposely encouraged them by keeping the colonial troops forcibly away from their brothels, to increase its aggressiveness. From documents from the Central State Archives, it appears that the white French soldiers were also guilty of violence: they were in Pico, Indeed, raped 51 women from 181 Franco-Africans and from 45 white French. These crimes were minimized by France – the complaint reports – asserting that the Italian women had done them, in large part, to provoke the Moroccan military.
