D'Annunzio's Fiume Enterprise and the Complexity of the History of the Istrian, Fiume and Dalmatian People Today

 

The Associations of Istrian, Fiuman and Dalmatian Exiles, in the long years from the post-war period to today, have been able to bear witness to the human events of the Julian-Dalmatian Exodus and the persecution of the native Italian-speaking populations of the eastern Adriatic.
Tale witness always has been full of tenacity, passion and tension towards an ideal of Memory able to actively contribute to a positive ethic in society.
In this action carried out in the name of truth, The Exiles' Associations have been able to patiently build an increasingly profitable relationship with the territory of origin and its current institutions.
There are now hundreds of conferences, presentations, exhibitions, as well as convivial moments, anniversaries and in-depth studies, conducted jointly by people of good will who live on both shores of the Adriatic.
Exogenous powers have raged against the Julian-Dalmatian people since the Treaty of Campo Formio, seeking in every way to divide this community, which passionately loves its land and its identity.
Today, This people is composed of a deep soul, made up of the Exiles and their descendants, scattered throughout the world, and by a physical immanence constituted by the Autochthonous Communities present in Slovenia and Croatia.
The complexity of the nature of these people is not always understood.
It is certainly not by those people who took a celebratory flight on September 12, the date of D'Annunzio's entry into Fiume, thinking that they could celebrate a Memory of which they probably do not know the nature and do not see the perspective. Just as it is not in the unmotivated declarations of the Presidency of the Republic of Croatia regarding the statue of D'Annunzio inaugurated on the same date in Trieste.
Our Associations have always remembered September 12th through conferences, publications and institutional initiatives, thus commemorating the Italian nature of the city., as expressed by the declaration of annexation to Italy pronounced autonomously by the National City Council on 30 October 1918, at the end of the First World War, when the borders between the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia were not yet defined (a fact that occurred only with the Treaty of Rapallo of 1920).
The massacres committed in Fiume at the end of the Second World War changed the ethnic face of the city in a bloody way, transforming its Italian-speaking majority into a minority and sealing its definitive annexation to the Communist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with the Treaty signed in Paris in 1947.
Since then, the Adriatic Diaspora Community has preserved the memory and history of Istrian, Rijeka and Dalmatian Italianity, initiating, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an increasingly intense dialogue with the Slovenian and Croatian governments and, above all, with the Italian Union.
Our People reject any provocation that undermines the identity construction pursued up to now, nor will it be intimidated by historical reconstructions that deny the two-thousand-year-old presence of our land, first Latin and then Venetian.
Our Associations will continue to bear witness to their own history and in the patient construction of a possible perspective for the survival of our own identity.

Antonio Ballarin
President of the Federation of Associations of Istrian, Fiuman and Dalmatian Exiles