Walwal Incident

The Abyssinia Crisis was a crisis in 1935 originating in the so-called Walwal incident in the ongoing conflict between the Kingdom of Italy and the Empire of Ethiopia (then commonly known as "Abyssinia" in Europe). The League of Nations ruled against Italy and voted for economic sanctions, but they were not fully applied. Italy ignored the sanctions, quit the League, made special deals with Britain and France and ultimately established control of Ethiopia. The crisis discredited the League and moved Fascist Italy closer to an alliance with Nazi Germany.

Both Ethiopia and Italy pursued a policy of provocation against each other and Italy prepared for invasion in Ethiopia, described as follows by the League of Nations:

At places where there is not a single Italian national, a consul establishes himself in an area known as consular territory with a guard of about ninety men, for whom he claims jurisdictional immunity. This is an obvious abuse of consular privileges. The abuse is all the greater that the consul's duties, apart from the supplying of information of a military character, take the form of assembling stocks of arms, which constitute a threat to the peace of the country, whether from the internal or the international point of view.

The Italo–Ethiopian Treaty of 1928 stated that the border between Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia was twenty-one leagues parallel to the Benadir coast (approximately 118.3 km [73.5 mi]). In 1930, Italy built a fort at the Walwal oasis (also Welwel, Italian: Ual-Ual) in the Ogaden, well beyond the twenty-one league limit. The fort was in a boundary zone between the nations, which was not well defined; today it is about 130 km (81 mi) inside Ethiopia.

On 29 September 1934, Italy and Abyssinia released a joint statement renouncing any aggression against each other.

On 22 November 1934, a force of 1,000 Ethiopian militia with three fitaurari (Ethiopian military-political commanders) arrived near Walwal and formally asked the Dubats garrison stationed there (comprising about 60 soldiers) to withdraw from the area. The Somali NCO leading the garrison refused to withdraw and alerted Captain Cimmaruta, commander of the garrison of Uarder, 20 kilometres (12 mi) away, to what had happened.

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