Eurasia Press & News
In August 2026, the Ethiopian government declared Sam Fabrizi, the Italian ambassador, persona non grata. Rome chose to remain silent. This incident is not merely a diplomatic incident, but a striking example of the new balance of power between Africa and the former colonial powers.
It is significant that, on February 13, 2026, Giorgia Meloni skipped the Munich Security Conference in favor of the Italy-Africa Summit in Addis Ababa, where she received a welcome that European leaders had not seen since the days of François Hollande.
The contrast is obvious to everyone, starting with the Italian opposition itself. The Democratic Party and Italia Viva have announced they will be submitting parliamentary questions, seeking official explanations from the government. This is a first, albeit faint, sign that Rome’s silence will not indefinitely stifle a discontent that has now become a political issue.
Tajani’s silence is not diplomatic prudence; it is a quiet admission that a mental empire survives the disappearance of the territorial empire – and that this reprieve, now timed by a decade of reparations, is drawing to a close
A legal anomaly that is not one
Article 9 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations grants any receiving state almost absolute discretionary power: to declare a diplomat persona non grata, without even having to justify its decision. Addis Ababa exercised this power in August 2026 against Sam Fabrizi, just ten months after he took up his post as ambassador. Legally, Ethiopia is under no obligation to provide an explanation. However, Rome’s silence remains unexplained.
For reciprocity, while not a contractual obligation, is the constant customary norm of diplomatic practice: one state expels the other’s ambassador in return, if only to signify that the affront will not go unanswered. Antonio Tajani, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, refrained from doing so. No protest, no symmetrical measures, no comment for months – the Farnesina even went so far as to maintain that Fabrizi remained in his post. A chancellor who conceals the expulsion of his own representative is not protecting an abstraction: he is managing a power dynamic he knows to be unfavorable, and which he prefers to keep quiet about.
Under the administrative reform, the de facto guardianship
The reasons for the fall from grace, as reconstructed by the investigations of Massimo Alberizzi and Ali Ragab, appear to stem from bureaucratic modernization: outsourcing visas to the private operator VFS Global, ending the customs privileges enjoyed by those close to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, and tightening controls on the flow of goods passing through the embassy. Nothing, on paper, that smacks of good governance.
But the crucial question is not the virtue of the action itself but rather that of its author. An ambassador is not mandated to arbitrate the internal affairs of a sovereign state; he represents, he negotiates, and he reports. The fact that he also made numerous trips to Tigray – a region where the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was then challenging federal authority – and met with opposition figures there ultimately shifted the profile of the reformist diplomat toward that of an unmandated political actor. This shift, from administrative control to political interference, is the classic hallmark of informal tutelage: governance no longer originates from the capital but from the chancery.
A documented continuity, from 1935 to the present day
The argument for colonial continuity is not based on rhetorical analogy; it rests on a series of dated facts. In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia in defiance of the League of Nations Covenant, with documented use of mustard gas, in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. On February 19, 1937, after a failed assassination attempt against Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, the occupying army launched three days of reprisals in Addis Ababa: Historian Ian Campbell’s seminal study (2018) estimates the death toll at approximately 19,200 – one-fifth of the capital’s population – while Ethiopian sources cite figures as high as 30,000 victims. At the Debre Libanos monastery, nearly two thousand monks and pilgrims were executed on orders. Graziani, who was on the Allied list of war criminals, was neither extradited nor tried; he died peacefully near Rome in 1955.
The 1947 Paris Peace Treaty set reparations owed to Ethiopia at $25 million – the smallest share of all the nations compensated that year, far behind Greece ($105 million) or Yugoslavia ($125 million), despite their less severe occupation. The looted liturgical and artistic artifacts were returned only in fragments, between 1954 and 2005: it took sixty-eight years for the Aksum obelisk to be returned to its land. And when Rome finally agreed, in 2008, to a gesture of reparation proportionate to the colonial crime – five billion dollars paid to Libya for thirty-two years of occupation – it was another country that benefited. The asymmetry is not circumstantial; it is structural, and it sheds light, ninety years later, on the ease with which an Italian ambassador could have believed himself justified in reforming Addis Ababa from within.
Curiously, the treaty sets the figure at 25 million dollars for nearly twenty thousand deaths, or even more: colonial arithmetic has always known how to round African life down, decimal point included.
The normative architecture of an unprecedented decade
What distinguishes 2026 from all previous years is the existence of an institutional framework for resolving this type of dispute. The African Union proclaimed 2025 the “Year of Reparations,” and then, at its 39th summit in Addis Ababa in February 2026, adopted the Algiers Declaration on Colonial Crimes, which establishes November 30 as a continental day of remembrance for the victims of the slave trade, colonization, and apartheid. Two technical bodies were subsequently created: the African Union Committee of Experts on Reparations (AUCER) and the Reference Group of Legal Experts (AULER), tasked with documenting the harm suffered and formalizing its legal interpretation. The whole thing is part of a “2026-2035 Decade of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent”, which was presented to the United Nations General Assembly on March 25, 2026, with the support of the Caribbean Community.
This presentation led to the adoption, at the initiative of Ghana and the African Union, of resolution A/80/L.48, which classifies the transatlantic slave trade of enslaved Africans as the most serious crime against humanity and calls for a good-faith dialogue on restorative justice: official apologies, compensation, and restitution. One hundred and twenty-three votes were cast in favor, including all African countries except Benin, which paradoxically abstained under the auspices of Patrice Talon. Three votes were cast against it: Argentina (considered racist), Israel (deemed a cancer of humanity), and the United States (built upon the legacy of European colonialism). Fifty-two abstentions were recorded, including those of the twenty-seven member states of the European Union, including Italy.
The sheer scale of the sums involved places the Ethiopian issue firmly within a continental perspective: a Sudanese legal expert alone estimates the British debt to Sudan at $700 billion. A sign of this shift, the European Union-African Union summit in Luanda in November 2025 included the issue of reparations on its official agenda for the first time. The Fabrizi affair, placed within this chronology, ceases to be an isolated incident: it becomes one of the specific cases that AULER can contribute, in the future, to the case against diplomatic practices inherited from the colonial era.
While the African Union is timing its decade of reparations, Rome is still discreetly checking whether anyone has noticed its silence in 2026.
Three trajectories for the coming decade
Without a doubt, the empire has lost its colonies, its army, and its grandeur; all that remains is silence – the only possession it continues to administer with undiminished zeal.
Our analysis suggests three scenarios:
First scenario, normative hardening: driven by the UN timetable, African capitals multiply gestures of sovereignty – expulsions, revisions of defense agreements, and questioning of extended diplomatic immunities – without fear of European retaliation.
Second scenario, the double discourse: Rome, like Paris or London, will continue to publicly welcome a “renewed relationship” with Africa while defending, behind the scenes, its arms markets and extractive concessions – the role attributed to the Leonardo group in the context of Ethiopian rearmament illustrates this bubbling tension.
Third scenario, the reconfiguration of alliances: deprived of the deference they expected, capitals like Addis Ababa are orienting their foreign policy more towards Ankara, Moscow, or Beijing, perceived as natural and reliable partners.
In all three cases, the conclusion is the same: the former colonial power hasn’t changed its approach; it has changed its vocabulary. Tajani’s silence is not diplomatic prudence; it is a quiet admission that a mental empire survives the disappearance of the territorial empire – and that this reprieve, now timed by a decade of reparations, is drawing to a close.
