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FederEsuli President responds to Stojan Spetic
Dear Senator Stojan Spetic,
We exiles are astonished by the words we read in the letter you addressed to the President of the Republic Mattarella and published on December 29th on the website:
In practice, more than 75 years after the end of the Second World War, what we learn is that you and, we imagine, many of your political party, remain firmly anchored to the thinking of a party comrade of yours, Piero Montagnani, who, in an article published in L'Unità on Saturday 30 November 1946, imposed a judgment as heavy as a boulder for the lives of at least three generations of people (including mine, but also that of my children, born in the 90s). And we mean that he has conditioned the lives of our people who, in order not to feel apostrophized according to what is reported in the colossal fake news artfully created by the Italian Communist Party on us, it had to do everything, absolutely everything, to survive, except commit crime (and the chronicles of the time bear witness to this).
So you are convinced that it is simply impossible: «…to consider those who poured into our great cities as having the right to asylum. Not under the pressure of the advancing enemy, but frightened by the breath of freedom that preceded or coincided with the advance of the liberating armies. » And he is still convinced that: «The hierarchs, the black brigands, the profiteers who have found refuge in the cities and squander the stolen wealth there and provide recruits for common crime, do not really deserve our solidarity nor do they have the right to steal our bread and space which are already so scarce.»
He will also be convinced that the spontaneous declaration of Milovan Đilas reported by Panorama magazine on July 21, 1991 and never denied, is a secondary issue, certainly not sufficient testimony to affirm that it was enough to have "Italian feelings" to be persecuted. For the record, that declaration reads as follows: «In 1946 [that is, after the war is over, ed.] Edward Kardelj and I went to Istria to organize anti-Italian propaganda. It was a matter of demonstrating to the Allied authorities that those lands were Yugoslavian and not Italian. Of course that wasn't true […]. But it was necessary to induce the Italians to leave with pressure of every kind. That's what was done».
In your letter to the President you report correct, timely, atrociously verifiable historical facts, but the problem is that these facts are all circumscribed during the war period – or immediately following the seizure of power by the fascist regime, that is, after '22.
We, however, continue to say and repeat that, to understand the tragedy of the Eastern Adriatic, which saw the anti-Italian persecution empty that land of our historical presence, we need to widen the observation window and start again at least from the disastrous Third War of Independence, resoundingly lost by Italy against Austria, at the conclusion of which that famous decree of the Council of the Habsburg Crown of 12 November 1866 was drawn up according to which: «His Majesty has given the precise order that decisive action be taken against the influence of the Italian elements still present in some regions of the Crown and, by appropriately occupying the positions of public employees, judiciary, teachers as well as with the influence of the press, work be done in South Tyrol, Dalmatia and on the Littoral for the Germanization and Slavization of said territories according to the circumstances, with energy and without any regard.» (see Section VI, vol. 2, session of 12 November 1866, p. 297).
It is from this declaration that Yug-Slavic nationalism (that is, the coalition of the southern Slavs: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, etc.) against the Italian-speaking population was born and took shape, when fascism didn't exist yet.
Communism, then, was the great umbrella under which this nationalism survived well beyond the end of the Second World War, so much so that our roll call, which also takes into account the post-war period, is missing between 10 and 12 thousand people: some thrown into sinkholes, some shot, some deported and died of starvation, some drowned, in a trail of blood that goes from '43 to all of the '50s.
So President Mattarella is right to talk about ethnic cleansing perpetrated with mass killings of people guilty only of being Italian, because that's exactly what it was about.
In a nice article from a few weeks ago, Adriano Sofri, recalling the tragic story of Pinelli in Il Foglio (14 December XNUMX), states: «It does not often happen that the relationship, and the contrast, between the actor and witness of the facts, and their historians, find themselves facing each other, one invoking his own lived truth and the other the probable truth of sources and documents.».
Here, to us exiles, born in our lands of origin or in exile or, like me, in marginal refugee settlements, all this has been happening for more than seventy years, that is to say that witnesses of facts and learned historians find themselves invoking, some the lived truth, and others sources and documents that are always and perpetually partial, or biased, or omitted, or artfully incomplete.
We do not understand his justification. It appears to us to be outside of any human logic. It imposes an aberrant vision of history and makes impossible any form of prevention so that similar tragedies can be avoided.
We could argue for hours, days, months and years, but I am convinced that we would never be able to have a shared vision, nor mutual acceptance. And this is absolutely unacceptable for a society that is committed to ensuring that similar tragedies do not happen again.
There is an extremely well documented archive at the Italian Army General Staff, the 'H8' archive, which meticulously lists with documents and images all the crimes committed by the Army in Italy and in the places of conflict during the Second World War. Yugoslavia, attacked by the fascist regime, was assigned to General Mario Roatta and Alessandro Pizio Brioli, the main perpetrators, but behind them there are many significant names.
Can someone explain to us why, instead of blaming the perpetrators of the atrocities perpetrated in that war, we continue to to justify the thesis that, all things considered, the reactions of the Slavic communist nationalists were "understandable" even though they were implemented after the war on civilian populations who had nothing to do with the crimes perpetrated during the war from people in uniform, if not sharing the same language?
What justification is there for the reprisals against innocent people (for example 54 priests rather than 300 fishermen, a bishop rather than a farmer, etc.) carried out after the war as reactions to brutal acts committed during the war and for which those responsible (Roatta first and foremost) enjoyed, first, the amnesty signed by comrade Palmiro Togliatti in 1946, at the time Minister of Justice, and, later, that signed by Minister Antonio Azara, under the Pella government?
What abstruse reasoning should justify the price of sins not committed imposed on defenseless and innocent native populations? What macabre accounting can justify such conjectures?
The question seems to us to be completely unreasonable, foolish, and damaging to the very principles of equality and freedom, which the communists flaunt as inalienable values.
Not only that, as we continue reading your speech, it also seems that, underneath, there is a natural justification for an Exodus of biblical proportions that emptied 90% of a territory (not 90% of Italians, but 90% of the entire population) as inevitable consequence of a previous exodus of Slavic populations that occurred in the aftermath of the First World War in the provinces of Gorizia, Trieste, Fiume, Pola and Zara (but by reading carefully the accurate data of the precise Austrian censuses one can clearly see how those populations were not indigenous, but rather, directed to occupy those cities as a result of the aforementioned resolution of the Habsburg Crown of November 1866).
The basic problem is that those who are communists do not recognize that the foibe, the persecution of the Italians of Istria and Dalmatia, whether fascists or anti-fascists (like the entire Istrian CLN, anti-fascist, but not communist, therefore... fascist!), is only the tip of an iceberg that sees, in the 900th century, rivers of blood for those who did not immediately align themselves with authoritarian regimes: yesterday Stalin and Pol Pot, today Maduro or Xi Jinping (it would be enough to consider what is happening in Hong Kong to understand what consideration the communist regime has for the "freedom of peoples").
Yet, again, it would be enough to read Martin Pollack and his “Contaminated Landscapes” to understand that behind smiling karst landscapes hide revolting atrocities such as Huda Jama in Slovenia, where the method of elimination adopted by the Yugoslavian regime was the same as that implemented with our foibe, but on different populations.
Despite its dramatic history, Slovenia, unlike Italy, is a great country, because it has been able to come to terms with its past, establishing a law that recognizes the drama of political persecution (the so-called Law of Torts) and is so avant-garde that it has applied that same law to hundreds of Italian exiles, coming from the territories that are now Slovenia, recognizing their confinement in a refugee camp as an act of persecution unjustly perpetrated by a totalitarian regime. An insufficient law, someone might say, but at least Slovenia is trying to re-establish the principle of the centrality of the person and his humanity.
You know better than I that the text of the historical report on the events of the Eastern Border, drawn up by the joint Italian-Slovenian commission, is insufficient for rereading what happened to us in Istria and Dalmatia. After all, that text, drawn up in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation, had more the purpose of bringing two countries closer together, one within the European Union, the other not yet, at a time when Slovenians, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, etc. were fighting each other to the death, when decades before they were all doing it together against a single ethnic group (Srebrenica docet).
The absurdity of comparing/contrasting Remembrance Day and Memorial Day is something revolting, for the falsity of the thing itself and, even more, for the umpteenth attempt to seek contrasts even where there are none.
The Menia Law proposal that established the Day of Remembrance is the result of a long and laborious mediation between political forces that lasted for years. Even before the institution of the Day of Remembrance, there was talk of issuing a single law that would take into account all the disastrous events perpetrated during the Second World War. Our Communities agreed with this line. It was chosen differently, and we respect the decision taken by Parliament, which voted by an overwhelming majority, but with the opposition of 15 deputies of the Communist Refoundation Party and the Italian Communists, all committed to your same line of justification, minimization, reduction, etc., who are the following: Armando Cossutta, Maura Cossutta, Titti De Simone, Elettra Deiana, Oliviero Diliberto, Alfonso Gianni, Francesco Giordano, Ramon Mantovani, Graziella Mascia, Giuliano Pisapia, Marco Rizzo, Giuseppe Cosimo Sgobio, Giovanni Russo Spena, Tiziana Valpiana, Nichi Vendola.
For you and your ideological companions, the Day of Remembrance will certainly be a “stumbling block” to beat on so that communist nationalism is not responsible for the atrocities suffered, but, if anything, that they are the just consequence for atrocities never committed by innocent people. People who, today, still suffer because they are not considered “equal” to other Italians and who are systematically denied rights that the same Treaty of 1947, so much praised by you, guaranteed: the preservation of property, used, instead, to pay a debt of an unwanted war.
If you want to make President Mattarella reflect on your justificationist arguments, we, on the other hand, with our desire that this story never happens again - and that we can finally live in peace, liquidating once and for all the political opposition that is being played out over our heads as if the War had never ended - want to put into practice in every way what President Mattarella suggested in his last speech to the Nation, at least as far as we are concerned and as far as it is within our possibilities.
We want to continue, as we have been doing for decades, to transform a nefarious memory into concrete and positive action, even if people like you try and will always try to mystify the truth.
With our suffering, with our oblivion perpetuated over the years, we wish to testify to the whole of Italy that without memory, history, culture, acceptance of diversity, without respect to offer to others and to demand for oneself and one's own identity, there is no hope for this Nation.
Arguments like the ones you reported, partial, biased, aimed at a partisan narrative, will always create a climate of hatred and tension, a fertile climate for arming the hand of the next idiot.
I hope you can reflect.
Regards.
Antonio Ballarin
Born in the Dalmatian Julian Village of Rome
President of the Federation of Associations of Istrian, Fiuman and Dalmatian Exiles
Rome, January 6, 2020
