The repression of memory led to historical revisionism in Italy[1] and in 2003 the Italian media published Silvio Berlusconi's statement that Benito Mussolini only "used to send people on vacation".
[2][3] There were numerous war crimes conducted by the Italian Army in the colonies.
In Cyrenaica alone between 1929 and 1933 over 40,000 people were killed and 80,000 locked up in concentration camps,[4] out of a total population of just 193,000.
According to the historian Ilan Pappé, the fascist regime between 1928 and 1932 killed half the Bedouin population either directly or by starvation in the fields.
[5] According to the historian Angelo Del Boca, in 1933, of the approximately 100,000 Libyans deported from Jebel Achdar and Marmarica, more than 40,000 died in the camps.