Haile Selassie's 1936 Appeal to the League of Nations

On June 30, 1936, Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia walked into the assembly hall of the League of Nations in Geneva to address the representatives of the world’s nations directly. It was an extraordinary moment: no reigning head of state had ever addressed the League assembly in person, and Haile Selassie did so as a monarch without a throne, having fled Ethiopia in early May as Italian forces closed in on Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia had been a League member since 1923, admitted at the urging of Haile Selassie himself, then serving as regent under the title Ras Tafari. That membership was supposed to guarantee collective security against exactly the kind of unprovoked aggression Italy had launched in October 1935, when Benito Mussolini’s forces invaded from Italian-controlled Eritrea and Somaliland in pursuit of a colonial empire in the Horn of Africa. The League had condemned the invasion and imposed limited economic sanctions on Italy, but the sanctions excluded oil and were never rigorously enforced; Britain and France, wary of pushing Mussolini toward Nazi Germany, quietly worked to broker a settlement that would have ceded much of Ethiopia to Italian control.

In his speech, delivered in Amharic and translated into French, Haile Selassie described in detail Italy’s use of mustard gas against Ethiopian soldiers and civilians, a weapon banned under the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which Italy had itself ratified. He recounted the bombing of field hospitals and Red Cross ambulance convoys, and pressed a direct question to the assembled delegates: what value collective security held for small nations if the League would not enforce it against a stronger aggressor. His most quoted line remains: “It is us today. It will be you tomorrow,” a warning that abandoning Ethiopia to unchecked aggression would only invite the same treatment of other nations, a prediction that read as prophetic once European war broke out three years later.

Some Italian journalists present reportedly jeered during the address, and accounts describe a tense, divided chamber. The speech won Haile Selassie enormous international sympathy (Time magazine later named him its 1935 Man of the Year), but it did not change the League’s course. Member states declined to strengthen sanctions, Italy formally annexed Ethiopia weeks later and merged it with Eritrea and Somaliland into Italian East Africa, and Italy withdrew from the League altogether in 1937. The episode is now remembered less as a diplomatic victory than as one of the clearest demonstrations of the League of Nations’ inability to restrain aggression among its own great-power members, a failure that fed directly into the case for a stronger postwar international body.