Marocchinate
Marocchinate (Italian for 'Moroccans' deeds'; pronounced [marokkiˈnaːte]) is a term applied to the mass rape and killings committed during World War II after the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy.
These were committed mainly by the Moroccan Goumiers, colonial troops of the French Expeditionary Corps (FEC),[1] commanded by General Alphonse Juin, and mostly targeted civilian women and girls (as well as a few men and boys) in the rural areas of Southern Lazio, between Naples and Rome.
Mass rapes continued across all the campaign including several locations in Tuscany: Siena, ad Abbadia S. Salvatore, Radicofani, Murlo, Strove, Poggibonsi, Elsa, S. Quirico d'Orcia, Colle Val d'Elsa.
Regular Moroccan troops (tirailleurs marocains) also served in Italy but under tighter discipline and with a higher proportion of officers than the irregular goumiers.
"[3] While there is no evidence of any such statement by General Juin, in 2007 Baris Tomaso justified it by claiming it was linked to the perception of the crimes by the Italians rather than an official policy of the French Army.
[10] The writer Norman Lewis, at the time a British officer on the Monte Cassino front, narrated the events: The French colonial troops are on the rampage again.
In Castro di Volsci doctors treated 300 victims of rape, and at Ceccano the British have been forced to build a guarded camp to protect the Italian women.
"In S. Andrea, the Moroccans raped 30 women and two men; in Vallemaio two sisters had to satisfy a platoon of 200 goumiers; 300 of these, on the other hand, abused a sixty-year-old.
Luciano Garibaldi writes that from the Moroccan departments of the gen. Guillaume girls and old women were raped; the men who reacted were sodomized, shot dead, emasculated or impaled alive.
A testimony, from a report of the time, describes their typical modality: "The Moroccan soldiers who had knocked on the door and which was not opened, knocked down the door itself, hit the fortress with the butt of the musket to the head making it fall to the ground unconscious, then she was carried about 30 meters from the house and raped while her father, by other soldiers, was dragged, beaten and tied to a tree.
Here the violence began again in Siena, in Abbadia S. Salvatore, Radicofani, Murlo, Strove, Poggibonsi, Elsa, S. Quirico d'Orcia, Colle Val d'Elsa.
"[14] Such statement was reinforced by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention under Article 4, which excludes allied nationals from the list of protected persons as long as their state maintains diplomatic relations with a belligerent power.
[17] Although the popular definition of "ciociaria" for some areas of Lazio is historically and geographically inappropriate, the term itself is often associated with these mass rapes.
The 1957 novel Two Women (original title La Ciociara, literally "the woman from Ciociaria") by Alberto Moravia references the Marocchinate; in it a mother and her daughter, trying to escape the fighting, are raped by Goumiers in an abandoned church.
In Castro dei Volsci, a monument called the "Mamma Ciociara" was erected to remember all the mothers who tried in vain to defend themselves and their daughters.
