At the end of the forty days of bloody Yugoslav occupation that began on May 1945st 1944, with Venezia Giulia divided along the Morgan Line into Zone A under Anglo-American military administration (Trieste, Gorizia and Pola) and Zone B under Yugoslav military administration (Istria and Fiume, Zadar having already been occupied in November XNUMX), the Peace Conference was launched.

On March 21, 1946, the inter-allied commission arrived in Pola to decide the fate of Pola, disputed between Italy and Yugoslavia. The patriotic demonstrations of the Polesani were significant, but in the Piazza del Foro the police of the Allied Military Government had to intervene to calm things down. The Italian demonstrators, in fact, had found themselves in the presence of a massive pro-Yugoslav demonstration, staged with the conspicuous contribution of inhabitants of the hinterland who had been brought in en masse to distort the perception of the ethnic composition that the American, English, French and Russian commissioners were called to verify. The massive night-time torchlight procession organized by the Italian community, which took place once the intruders had returned to their homes in Zone B, was a passionate attempt to reaffirm their identity.

Even more so, on the following 2nd June the National Liberation Committee of Pola organised a polling station in its own headquarters for the institutional Referendum and the concurrent elections for the Constituent Assembly, and then sent the results to Rome. However, those ballots were never examined, since the Lieutenant Decree no. 99 of 16th March 1946 had deemed that

the electoral assemblies are called for June 2, 1946…with the exception of the electoral college of Venezia Giulia and the province of Bolzano, for which the calling of the electoral assemblies will be arranged with subsequent provisions.

This convocation was never arranged, but on the anniversary of June 2nd we remember that Istrians, citizens of Fiume and Zadar were unable to exercise their right to vote.

Lorenzo Salimbeni