Regarding the upcoming Visit of the President of Slovenia Borut Pahor and President Mattarella to the National Monument of the Foiba of Basovizza, the Federation of Associations of Istrian, Fiuman and Dalmatian Exiles has drawn up a political summary document on the importance of the event.

The world of the Julian-Dalmatian Exodus represented by these Associations has great expectations for what will emerge as a consequence of this historic visit.
We attach the draft text below.

 

BASOVIZZA, JULY 13, 2020

THE WORLD'S EXPECTATIONS OF THE JULIAN-DALMATIAN EXODUS FOLLOWING THE HISTORIC VISIT TO THE FOIBA BY THE PRESIDENTS OF ITALY AND SLOVENIA

The planned visit that the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella will make, together with the President of the Republic of Slovenia Borut Pahor, to the Basovizza Foiba in the coming days is an event of historic significance.

Not only will an Italian Head of State come to honor that National Monument after the visits of his predecessors Cossiga and Scalfaro, which took place, respectively, in the distant 1991 and 1997, but it will be the first time ever that the highest representative of one of the States formed following the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia will go to the place most emblematic for the world of the Julian-Dalmatian Exodus.

In reality, President Pahor's visit is the result of a slow but progressive and praiseworthy metabolization of the history of the young state he governs.

Slovenia, around 45, was the scene of a civil war, first open and then creeping, which saw more than 600 quarries, caves, pits and sinkholes spread across its territory, where thousands of victims, certainly not and not only of Italian ethnicity, found death at the hands of the communists.

Slovenia has always joined, we can say from the very beginning, a process of integration with the European Union in the name of seeking a stable and peaceful balance with its neighboring states. Proof of this was also the Concert of the Three Presidents of Italy, Croatia and Slovenia promoted and directed by Muti in Trieste in July ten years ago in the presence, precisely, of Napolitano, Türk and Josipović.

The praiseworthy Law of Torts, approved by the Slovenian Parliament about twenty years ago – whose purpose was precisely to offer reparation, as far as possible, for the wrongs suffered by citizens following the persecutions of the previous regime – should always be interpreted on the same wavelength. It is also applied to many Exiles considered victims of communist oppression. A law that certainly cannot provide satisfaction for the harassment, violence, uprooting and abuse suffered, but which, undoubtedly, marks a very clear path regarding the dutiful respect for the rights at the basis of a worthy civilization.

Pahor's visit to Basovizza, therefore, cannot but be greeted with great and expected satisfaction by our entire world, since it constitutes an explicit recognition of the ethnic cleansing perpetrated in the former Yugoslavia, precisely by a State heir to that Socialist Federal Republic.

As can be seen from the program, the visits of Mattarella and Pahor to Trieste will not stop at the Basovizza Foiba. The two Presidents will pay homage to the monument located in the village of Basovizza in memory of four nationalist terrorists of the Slovenian minority executed following a sentence of a special court in 1930. They will continue with a ceremony for the transfer to the Slovenian community of the former Balkan hotel, destroyed in a fire after violent clashes between the population in Trieste, the result of the strong nationalist tensions of 1920 that broke out in the aftermath of the killing by pan-Yugoslavian hands in Split of two officers of the Royal Navy. Finally, they will greet other city and regional authorities at the Prefecture.

An extremely eventful day.

The Federation of Associations of Istrian, Fiuman and Dalmatian Exiles has long since matured its historical judgment both on the burning of the Balkans and on the execution of the sentence of the four Slovenian nationalists and has no intention of falling into rearguard polemics, the final effect of which would be only the production of sterile dialectical controversies, aimed at sharpening and rekindling tensions and frictions in a social fabric that is still extremely delicate today, even though a hundred years have passed since the occurrence of these events.

In fact, historical dialectics translates, inevitably and in some circumstances like these, into political or, worse, nationalistic instrumentalizations, where the sacredness of human life irreparably fades into the background, just as the desire for respect "to offer" to those who have feelings and thoughts different from ours and "to request", with equal firmness, for our history and our dignity, fades into the background.

The key point is not centered in these controversies but, rather, in the honor that Pahor and Mattarella will express for the victims of the Foibe and for the Julian-Dalmatian Exodus symbolically enclosed in the National Monument of the Foiba of Basovizza. It is this gesture that marks its figure and its basic prospective importance.

For years, since the very early post-war period, our world has been silenced, marginalized, cancelled, distorted, accused without reason and it is only in the last few years that the tenacity of the Exiles and their descendants has been able to break through a wall of silence that begins in the school books and ends at the offices of the Public Administration, where even today, those born in Istria, Kvarner and Dalmatia see on their documents the attestation of an unsought diversity and, with it, note a permanent and widespread ignorance.

In order for the historic visit of the two Presidents to the Basovizza Foiba to not be a mere formality but a concrete initiative aimed at repairing wrongs suffered for more than seventy years, it must be transformed into a proactive action that sees, first of all, the definition once and for all of the points brought to the Government-Exiles Table, established at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, since the meeting of 12 February 2015 and even before.

It is necessary that the highest offices of the State give a political twist to issues that drag on without ever reaching a just and dignified conclusion, since we, the world of the Julian-Dalmatian Exodus, are invariably treated as children of a lesser god.

“Our” requests are considered subsequent and consequent to continuous emergencies that, year after year, afflict our Homeland: from the Vajont disaster to an oil crisis, from the economic crisis to an earthquake, from the change of a Government (for which everything starts again from the beginning as if the “before” had never happened) to the appearance of an epidemic. “Our” requests always come “after”, since “before” us there is always another emergency.

But the frustration of feeling perceived as “not urgent”, despite the formal celebrations that copiously fill the media and political landscape in the run-up to February 10, does not diminish the urgency of the fulfillment by a Nation, ours by birth and by choice, of tasks established by international Treaties, since its very dignity depends on it.

A civilized state honors its debts. And the debt to us is not yet extinguished.

It is not enough to let time pass hoping for oblivion and forgetfulness, because a crime remains a crime in history even when its perpetrator dies.

The announced event that will see Pahor and Mattarella as protagonists, so awaited by the world of Exodus, so that it is not a pure formality requires the proactive activation of the two States in our favor.

If Balkan is awarded to the Slovenian community of Trieste, one cannot but wait for the restitution of the 179 properties left freely available to the Italian citizens Exiles former owners, as foreseen by the Rome Agreement of 1983.

Similarly, to the visit to a Foiba by President Pahor and, hopefully, tomorrow, by other Presidents, we ask that a season follow in which it is possible to freely honor with a stele, a multilingual inscription or a religious sign the many places on Slovenian territory that bear witness to the martyrdom of people killed in a barbaric manner, without small local authorities preventing it in the name of who knows what divisive logic.

We ask that the Italian State activate a process for a “fair and just compensation” which, although insufficient in repairing an atrocious wrong – such as the use of private property to pay a war debt of a State – at least partially alleviates a fundamental right established in the Treaty of Paris of 1947 and violated by Italy without any reticence.

We ask that the funds owed by Slovenia and Croatia due to the Treaty of Osimo be repaid to those "entitled" and that what is left be inviolably incorporated into a Foundation of Istrian, Fiuman and Dalmatian Exiles, from whose proceeds activities will be created for the maintenance of the historical memory of the Italian-Italian speakers of the Eastern Adriatic.

We call for the integration and expansion of the “Report of the Joint Italian-Slovenian Historical-Cultural Commission”, drawn up in 2000, through the establishment of a new international Commission with the presence of academic personalities from Italy, Slovenia and Croatia.

We ask our State, as we have already had occasion to point out several times, to set up a Parliamentary Commission on the massacre of Vergarolla, near Pola, since it occurred in August 1946, in peacetime, and it is the largest massacre on Italian soil ever to have occurred since the post-war period to date, for which no official investigation has ever been conducted by the Italian Authorities, and yet, massacres, as is known, never become statute-barred.

We ask for the representation in Parliament of a personality coming from the world of the Julian-Dalmatian Exodus – whether a senator for life or elected in another way – both for a sense of fairness and in reparation for the wrong suffered for the non-participation in the '46 Referendum of the Provinces of Gorizia, Trieste, Pola, Fiume and Zara, Italian until 15 September 1947.

We sincerely hope that the historic event scheduled for the near future at the Basovizza Foiba will not remain, in the future, an inert citation in history books, but will constitute a turning point for which thousands of people from our Associations have worked, with dedication, with a spirit of sacrifice and abnegation, for the love of an Ideal and of their Land, without ever breaking even a single window pane.

Rome, 1st July 2020

The President of Federesuli Dr. Antonio Ballarin