Speech by the President of the Federation of Associations of Istrian, Fiuman and Dalmatian Exiles
Dr. Antonio BALLARIN
at the ceremony of the Senate of the Republic for the Day of Remembrance of the Foibe and the Julian-Dalmatian Exodus.

Rome, 9 February 2018

Mr President of the Republic,
Mr. President of the Senate,
Madam Speaker of the House,
Representatives of Parliament and Government,
Authority,
Ladies and Gentlemen.
Friends and Brothers of Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia,
Here today, we do not celebrate a memory of things that were and are no longer there, but the Memory of facts that have extended the
their consequences for future generations. Seventy years later, these generations are asking that the accounts opened by the
Italian state with the history on the skin of people without guilt should be closed definitively.
Our request, renewed year after year, is a civil request that takes place in compliance with the rules, as it has always been, and
It is expressed with determination and firmness proportional to the great sense of civilization of the Istrian, Rijeka and Dalmatian people.
In 2007, the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano, solemnly celebrating the Day of Remembrance at the Quirinale, thus
he said: «Last year President Ciampi wanted the first award ceremony of the medal to take place here
“Day of Remembrance” to the families of the victims […] of the foibe, of the exodus and of the more complex story of the eastern border. I take up the example of my predecessor to confirm the duty that the institutions of the Republic feel as their own, at all levels, of a recognition that has been missing for too long. […]

For a certain number of years now, research and reflections by historians have intensified […] and we must certainly make the most of them in order to spread a memory that has already risked being erased, in order to transmit it to the younger generations […]. Thus, it has been written, in an effort at a more detached analysis, that already at the outbreak of the first wave of blind violence in those lands,
in the autumn of 1943, “summary and tumultuous judicialism, nationalist paroxysm, social revenge and a plan to eradicate” the Italian presence from what was, and ceased to be, Venezia Giulia were intertwined. There was therefore a movement of hatred and bloodthirsty fury, and a Slavic annexationist plan, which prevailed above all in the Peace Treaty of 1947, and which took on the sinister contours of an “ethnic cleansing”.»
These words of the President, awaited for decades by our people, pronounced at the Quirinale, the home of the Italians, seemed
to finally tear away the blanket of silence carefully constructed to silence the tragedy of a people and to lie to an entire nation that Italy, as an aggressor state, had lost and certainly not won the Second World War.
Our people finally felt like they were no longer second-class Italians, but they were deluding themselves.
In fact, if on the one hand we, the people of the Exodus, bear witness with the Memory of our history to an ethic aimed at welcoming, integrating, and respecting humanity – precisely because these categories have been denied to us – if on the one hand we, the people of the Exodus,
we bear witness to the need to build a society within which the violence resulting from ideology – such as the one we practice
suffered – never have citizenship again, on the other hand we witness violent regurgitations of justificationism and reductionism of the
our history, which represent a continuation of the violence suffered, submitting, once again, reason to ideology.
Does it make sense to justify violence to a primary action that is also violent? Does it make sense to do so against someone who was not connected to the original violent action? Evidently not, otherwise, if it were not so, it would be correct, from a logical point of view, to justify other brutal massacres as well.
In the disinterest of a certain society, which does not express as it should any reaction of indignation, we hear the violence against the civilian population suffered in Venezia-Giulia and Dalmatia justified, since they are considered as acts of war, on a par with those conducted by the Italian Army. But if this is the case, then why massacre, drown, deport even after the war?
Even in '46, '47, '48, '49 and for the first half of the '50s? Why do it after the war?
Despite the evidence that certifies the historical truth, we do not get an answer to this question, if not a brutal forcing.
of reality.
But justificationism is not the only reality our people have to deal with. Seven years later, we are
still struggling with an endless battle for the respect of human rights still waiting to be re-established.
We cannot deny that much has been done and that a certain greater attention from the State towards the open cases has been demonstrated, but the road is still long and at times it almost seems as if we are dealing with hostile officials, affected by
prejudiced, uninformed about history or treaties and laws and, worse, indifferent to the debt they still owe us.
The points we are talking about are:
The final compensation of our Abandoned Assets, used by the State to pay its war debt with the former Yugoslavia in violation of what is stipulated in the International Treaties.
The delivery of the Gold Medal for Military Valor to the city of Zara, the Italian city bombed 51 times by the Allied air force
and with the highest number of civilian victims in the population. Medal awarded by President Ciampi but never delivered.
The full implementation of the Treaty of Osimo.
The inclusion of the topic of the 1947 Peace Treaty in the curricula of Public Education.
The definitive resolution of registry problems that sometimes see one of our people being born in a municipality that was
Italian as a non-EU citizen.
Honours to the fallen, that is, the possibility of extracting from the places where they were murdered the remains of those who are still without a worthy burial or, at the very least, the possibility of honouring those places (which is still effectively prevented today) by indicating them with multilingual tombstones.
The extension of the time period that awards honors to the relatives of those killed in the infoiba in order to extend the clock of massacres that stops at 1950.
The cancellation of the tax on properties purchased abroad for our people who after a life of sacrifices buy back the
property expropriated at the time.
And finally the implementation, with fewer bureaucratic constraints, of law 72 of 2001 which protects the historical and cultural heritage of
community of exiles from Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia.
Culture is not the echo of any nationalism but reflects the stable element of human existence and its development. For us
culture is the element that allows the conservation of identity, safeguarding it despite dispersion.
This is why law 72/2001 is crucial in the delicate ecosystem that extends between the two shores of the Adriatic.
Well, today, February 2018, we are waiting for the 2013 funds!
This is precisely the kind of negligence that the people of the Exodus attribute to the political class and the bureaucracy.
On the one hand, we express satisfaction for the attention that some central government bodies reserve for us (as in the case of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cultural Heritage, Education, Defense), on the other hand we still highlight hostility, prejudice
and indifference.
We believe that these attitudes, which the institutions cannot allow towards us, are the aftermath of
blanket of silence and lies with which our history has been denied for years.
Memory is one of the constitutive elements of a secular, evolved, civil civilization, open to the religious sense, stopping only at
Memory turns this day into a sterile regret for the time that was.
Remembrance Day is not a point of arrival, but of departure. As good and tenacious heirs of a noble, cultured, open and lively civilization, we
let's roll up our sleeves and rebuild, day after day, our visceral belonging to an Earth, our own
identity.