Give dignity to the victims, without alibis or justifications. Possible horizons that, on days like this, 75 years after the end of the war, still seem elusive. Of course, the truth of the sinkholes, by now, it can no longer be denied. However, it can always be mitigated, reduced, justified.

This is it, for Antonio Ballarin, second generation exile and president of FederEsuli, the "moral" of the conference organized today by Anpi in the Senate. “A conference – Ballarin claims – that was wrong from the very beginning”. “Why – he asks – was there none of us sitting at that table?”. Ballarin, born in 1959, should have been born on the island of Lussino (now Croatia). Instead, the Yugoslav communists tore him away from that land and that sea, and he found himself born as a refugee, in the former workers’ village of Eur, in Rome. His only fault? Being the son of Italian parents. That’s why, as soon as he read the title of the event (“Border fascism and the tragedy of the foibe”), he immediately darkened. “A title – he says – with a justificationist flavour”. And so he decided to show up at Madama palace, and sat down in the stalls.

He hoped to dispel a prejudice, but it didn't go that way. Imagine what he must have felt when he heard his story, his drama, told by someone who didn't live it. By someone who seems to still look at the past through the lens of ideology. And then how bitter it must have been when one of the speakers began by citing "two myths to dispel". The first: "Not all Italians are good people". "We are talking about thousands of Italians, thrown into sinkholes, drowned, shot, without even a shred of a trial. I wonder - he reasons - if it is right to get the message across that perhaps some of them deserved that end". And the second: "What happened in Istria and Dalmatia was not ethnic cleansing". "90 percent of the people who left there, including my family, were Italian", he replies. “And that Tito's was an operation to erase the Italian identity from those territories – he adds – was also confirmed in 1991 by his right-hand man Milovan Gilas, in an interview with Panorama".

Then, there are the numbers that don't add up: 4-5 thousand victims for the Anpi, 10-12 thousand for the associations of exiles. And not even a mention of the fact that the persecutions did not end with the war, but continued even in times of "peace", until the XNUMXs. In short, there are still many, too many aspects on which we cannot find a convergence. "I have been saying for years - concludes Ballarin - that we must sit down and discuss, only in this way will we be able to hand over a united country to the new generations". "But to do so - he warns - we must put aside the prejudices of politics".