The Adriatic Coordination Association expresses its surprise and disappointment at the way the program "1947 A New World Was Born" broadcast by Tele Capodistria portrayed to television viewers the historical events surrounding the fateful year 1947, the year in which Italy was subject to the peace treaty signed between the victorious powers of the Second World War.

The overall approach of the broadcast offered a completely one-sided assessment of positive sharing of the atmosphere established by Titoist communism in the Adriatic coastal area in that period. Everything was reduced to a glorification of agrarian reform and to the classist emphasis on the affirmation of the proletariat. And this with an evident distortion of historical reality. In fact, while it was right to remember the victims of the Risiera di San Sabba and the ruthless regime imposed by the Nazis in the Adriatic Coast Operations Zone, it seems unacceptable to have ignored the thousands of people eliminated by the Yugoslav national communists even after the war ended. No evidence of the systematic violence suffered by the entire Italian community, no mention of the foibe massacres, silence on the Vergarolla massacre and not even a reference to the deportations and the climate of terror carried out by the OZNA. Without these antecedents it is impossible to understand what drove almost the entire indigenous Italian community to abandon their businesses, their homes, and the land on which they had lived for centuries.

This distorting reconstruction involves the sharing by Coordinamento Adriatico of the many reasoned criticisms indicated in the position taken by the Federation of Associations of Istrian, Fiume and Dalmatian Exiles, which must not be rewritten here.

We believe this clarification is necessary to correctly define the position of Coordinamento Adriatico, an association that has always intended to operate in the context of dialogue between exiles and those who “remained” in order to heal the fracture caused by the results of the Second World War, but in a historically rigorous and scientifically in-depth manner, far from the laudatory and benevolent tones towards the regime established by Tito that instead emerge at times in this documentary.

 

Professor Giuseppe de Vergottini

President of the Adriatic Coordination Association

 

Bologna, 22 September 2017