Speech by Prof. Avv. Giuseppe de Vergottini, President of the Federation of Associations of Istrian, Fiume and Dalmatian exiles, at the institutional ceremony of the Day of Remembrance 2021 held in the Palazzo dei Gruppi Parlamentari (Rome) on Wednesday 10 February.

 

Law no. 30 of 2004 March 92, in establishing the Day of Remembrance, confirmed the dramatic nature of the exodus of almost the entire Italian population of the Julian territories caused by the violence suffered after 8 September 1943 and at the end of the Second World War.

Thus the void that had been created between the memory of the exiles and that of the entire Nation was filled. One cannot help but remember that not only had the Istrians, the people of Fiume and the Dalmatians been forced to pay on behalf of the entire Country the catastrophic consequences of an unfortunate war, reduced to a mere object of other people's choices, but that a silence had fallen on the fate of the victims and survivors that had lasted too long. Paradoxically, with their abandoned and then nationalized assets by the Belgrade regime, the Italian State, in contravention of the provisions of the peace treaty, paid part of the reparations owed to Yugoslavia while it had not yet paid fair compensation to the exiles and their descendants.

The 2004 law therefore represented a sort of moral compensation that the Republic decided for a dutiful official reintegration of the exiled people into the national community.

After the events of the last years of the war and the post-war period, the marginalization of the presence of the Julians has unfortunately been constant for many years: excluded from national history and forgotten by culture and the world of information.

And in reality history has conspired to bring about this state of affairs.

Let's start with the preclusion for almost a million citizens of Venezia Giulia of the possibility of exploiting the recovery of democratic institutions. In Trieste, Gorizia, Istria, Fiume and Zara there was no April 25th but in those days people lived in a climate of fear and oppression by the Yugoslav occupier. In the months that followed, participation in the renewed political dialectic that was developing throughout the national territory was not possible. The 13 deputies foreseen for the XII Constituency (Trieste and Venezia Giulia-Zara) were absent from the Constituent Assembly because they were subjected to the Yugoslav occupation.

If it is true that the Constituent debate was a fundamental step in defining the founding values ​​of the Republic, it is easy to understand how dramatic it was for the Italians of the Eastern Adriatic – still nominally under Italian sovereignty – to feel excluded from the constituent moment and abandoned to an uncertain fate. The words pronounced by Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, provisional president of the Assembly who decided to inaugurate the proceedings were not mere words of circumstance: «In memory of the desperate pain of this hour, in the tragedy of our people from Trieste, Gorizia, Pola, Fiume, Zara, all of Venezia Giulia, who, however, if they did not vote, are nevertheless present, since no material force and no immoral trade can prevent them from always being present where Italy is present».

The victory of democracies should have allowed the principle of self-determination to be respected, but no possibility was given to the Julians to express themselves in a proposed plebiscite in favor of remaining or separating from the Italian state. The failure to take into account the will of the Julian populations was recalled by De Gasperi in his well-known speech on August 10, 1946 at the Paris Conference and, subsequently, by Benedetto Croce in his plea against the ratification of the peace treaty before the Constituent Assembly on July 24, 1947, when he stated that with respect to Italy «against the commitments of the so-called Atlantic Charter, (are) introduced clauses that violate its sovereignty over the populations that remain».

There was nothing left but to have to endure the annexation of four fifths of the territory to Yugoslavia with the only harsh alternative of exodus and precarious accommodation in refugee camps, for many of which even became harsh and cold homes for decades.

After the peace treaty, subsequent agreements with Yugoslavia up to the so-called Treaty of Osimo were negotiated in secret, placing Italians in the region before a series of fait accompli.

 

Who are the victims?

The disinterest of official Italy in the suffering of the civilian population, in the atrocious end of so many innocents, in the reduction of a large portion of the national territory for the redemption of which Italy had paid a very high contribution of lives in the First World War, had therefore appeared completely unacceptable to the community of exiles.

I would like to point out here that the victim of those brutal atrocities after September 8 was essentially the civilian population, and that after the end of the conflict the Yugoslavian occupier proceeded to eliminate anyone considered fascist or collaborator or simply considered opponents of the annexation of the territory to Yugoslavia. In this phase, the members of the Liberation Committees formed by Italians were also eliminated. The annexation entailed the exodus of Italians, completing the work of denationalization of the Adriatic territories already completed in Dalmatia following the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920.

A policy of occupation was therefore implemented that included the transfer of people from various Yugoslav regions to the Julian territories. In this climate, Italians had to resign themselves to abandoning their homes to escape the violence and the climate of intimidation introduced by the new popular power. For the first time in history, the change of regime in the Adriatic territories was accompanied by a radical change in the ethnic balance, unlike what had occurred at the end of Venetian sovereignty at the end of the eighteenth century and that of the Habsburgs in 1918.

 

Historical insight.

Today is the moment of national sharing of the tragedy of the foibe and the exodus. Unfortunately, we must acknowledge that a minority orientation persists in the world of culture and information that is unacceptable to us and that aims to contest the purposes of the 2004 law. Against denialism and reductionism, we oppose the appeal to reason without entering into sterile polemics. Denying, justifying and minimizing what has been suffered constitutes a new and serious form of violence.

We are convinced that it is right and proper not to forget this part of national history by helping to make it known to those who are still unaware of these events. Obviously, talking about the foibe and the exodus as the 2004 law encourages us to do does not mean preventing reflection on the complexity of Italy's relations with the Slavic populations and analyzing without hesitation and ideological preclusions and with the seriousness of historical investigation the undeniable Italian responsibilities of the past.

We certainly have no fear of historical truth as long as it is verified by competent institutions and researchers interested in deepening with intellectual honesty the knowledge of a controversial period of our national history.

We do not share improper readings of the facts that lead either to emphasize or, on the contrary, to minimize the number of victims. Unfortunately, the size of the Italian exodus that forced almost 90% of the native population to abandon the territory is an uncontested and indisputable fact that speaks for itself.

In this regard, we believe that it is perhaps time to relaunch the proposal to establish new bilateral Italian-Slovenian and Italian-Croatian historical commissions, 20 years after the previous experience of the Italian-Slovenian only, in order to address the most recent pages of the history of the Eastern Adriatic in a more collaborative spirit, in light of the highly symbolic events that have occurred in the meantime and that the world of exiles has always welcomed with deep agreement (the entry of Slovenia and Croatia into the EU, the Three Presidents' concert, the concert at the Pula Arena, and lastly the meeting of the Italian and Slovenian Presidents in Basovizza on 13 July last year, the European Parliament's equating of communist and Nazi-fascist totalitarianism with the resolution of 13 July 2020, the choice of the dual reality of Gorizia as European Capital of Culture 2025). It is in this renewed climate that we want to see an active commitment to overcoming the adversities of the past by committing ourselves beyond the rhetoric of circumstance.

 

A humanitarian gesture of reparation.

We believe it is our duty to ask our institutions for timely and no longer postponable help to honor the victims of the massacres of more than seventy years ago. We can no longer allow the places where the executions took place after September 8, 1943 and in the post-war period to still lack appropriate recognition plaques and to be often neglected and sometimes difficult to locate. It is unacceptable to deny the families of the victims the ability to remember their loved ones on the spot. The issue is particularly unacceptable if one considers that many of these victims were civilians as happened on August 18, 1946 in Pola, still Italian territory, where a hundred people were killed on the beach of Vergarolla in the first massacre suffered by the Republic.

Added to this is the problem of finding the remains of people killed and deported after the end of the conflict, certain victims of murder. This is still a current issue today, as demonstrated by the repeated and even very recent findings of numerous sinkholes and mass graves in what is now Slovenian and Croatian territory, which could also contain the remains of our fellow countrymen, as the Mayor of Gorizia suggested in requesting the Government to intervene in the search for fellow citizens taken in May 1945. Today, the necessary assistance of the Slovenian and Croatian authorities appears credible, as indicated by the collaboration provided for the recovery of the remains of the victims of Castua and Ossero. We believe that the action of our diplomatic authorities can be fruitfully combined with the collaboration of the Italian Union, the representative body of our minority present in the territory with which the Federation actively collaborates.

In conclusion What are the expectations of the associations that preserve the memory of the exodus?

As anticipated, we believe it is essential to maintain the attention of the school world, emphasizing that only through the careful action of teachers of the different school levels will it be possible to consider the events that we remember today as part of national history. The encouragement of historical analysis should also be combined with the reconstitution of expert commissions open to the participation of representatives of the current state realities of the region.

To formalize the memory we have long suggested inserting an exhibition section on the history of the eastern border, with particular reference to the exodus, at the Altare della Patria in a sector of the wing of the Vittoriano usually dedicated to exhibitions. It is a matter of realizing the project already prepared at the time of the Ciampi presidency and which requires the sharing of the MIBACT.

We note with satisfaction that the relations between the Republic and the neighboring states, thanks to careful political and diplomatic action, have marked clear progress in recent years. We hope that in this renewed climate and in the sharing of the values ​​that characterize the Council of Europe and the European Union of which we are part, it will be possible to find an honorable solution to undertake all the necessary searches for the victims and to give recognition to the places of executions.

In view of the demonstrated willingness of the Croatian authorities to collaborate in the exhumations of Kastav and Ossero, we want to be very hopeful regarding the definitive assignment of the Gold Medal to the banner of the City of Zadar. Last but not least, despite the awareness of the presence of a formal obstacle to the revocation, we cannot ignore the moral wound that the honor once assigned to the Yugoslav dictator entails.

Finally, it is absolutely necessary to insist on the fulfillment of all those obligations, economic but also of protection of rights and values ​​that even today, although written in bilateral treaties, are not fully complied with.

 

Thanks

With these premises, we thank Parliament for the commitment with which it has followed and continues to follow our events. We acknowledge with deep gratitude the President of the Republic for having constantly shown himself attentive to the meaning of the values ​​that characterize the national identity and aware of the meaning of the sacrifices borne with dignity and decorum by the community of exiles. We are grateful to the Presidency of the Council, to the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Cultural Heritage for having followed with commitment the implementation of projects aimed at safeguarding our cultural heritage and to the Miur for the incessant activity aimed at spreading knowledge of our events in schools.

 

Joseph of Vergottini
President of the Federation of Associations of Istrian, Rijeka and Dalmatian Exiles