Below is the speech given by the President of the Federation of Associations of Istrian, Fiume and Dalmatian Exiles, Dr. Antonio Ballarin, during the institutional ceremony of the Day of Remembrance 2019 held at the Quirinale on Saturday 9 February. 

 

So that what happened never happens again. This is the meaning of Remembrance Day. May the abominations suffered by the Istrian, Fiume and Dalmatian people be a warning to human hearts and minds, so that a season of peace and tolerance may prosper and last. So that the suffering, the gratuitous violence, the marginalization we have suffered no longer have citizenship for any ethnic, religious, political group, nor because of the ideas professed, nor based on the social status of individuals. So that the actions of men and women may be governed in a spirit of brotherhood. So that human rights are respected, even if some of ours have been waiting to be respected for seventy years. And for truth to guide people's actions and judgments. The little pins or handkerchiefs we wear are not fashionable frills, but medals created to remain faithful to the truth of our Memory and to an identity that acts as a beneficial leaven in society. It's not rhetoric. Throughout the year, to witness this sense of civilization, hundreds and hundreds of volunteers, responding to the urgency of affirming an ideal, tell our story and transfer, in this way, the highest human values. And after the narration, for years, the same people take it upon themselves to guide other people, previously unaware, to the places where it all began. By doing so, day after day, the fracture is healed in a people whose overwhelming majority chose the Exodus and whose minimal part remained in Istria, Kvarner and Dalmatia. Our Associations have been practicing their commitment for years in favor of a Memory that is able to build an ethic of peace and truth. And it is precisely thanks to this commitment that it has been possible to understand the true soul of our people, passionate lovers of the land to which they belong, transmitting these values ​​also to the institutions that today govern Istria, Kvarner and Dalmatia. Only thanks to this patient work was it possible, for example, to exhume a few months ago the victims of Castua, near Fiume, massacred, like many others, at the end of the war. We can only thank those institutions, Croatian, Slovenian and Italian, which have allowed an act of justice and human compassion to be realized, demonstrating, today, a high sense of civilization. But that's not enough. We need to continue in this direction. More of our dead are waiting for a tombstone to remember them where they died. Just as the commitment of Politics is necessary, the one with a capital 'P', to which we ask for help to define once and for all the expectations of our people, in compliance with international Treaties that must be respected, under penalty of little credibility and disaffection from public affairs. The world of the Julian-Dalmatian Exodus has long been able to overcome the barriers of political ideology, as well as the fences artfully constructed by nationalisms. And yet, despite this, despite the patient work of testimony aimed at building, at giving a future vision, at reconciling, at making people understand that without Memory there is no future and without awareness of evil there is no possibility of life, there always remains an aura of discrimination that is hard to die and that hovers over the world of the eastern Adriatic, a hinge between peoples and never a caesura. In the face of an increasingly well-known and shared Memory, we witness, astonished, attempts conducted by a small ideologized minority aimed at minimizing our drama and we ask ourselves how it is possible to 'justify'. It is as if we do not realize that the justification of one barbarity calls for the justification of other barbarities and so on, until we repeat the horrors of ethnic cleansing and existential oblivion, like the one experienced by our families. Crimes such as the Vergarolla massacre – the largest of the Republican period, which occurred in Pola on 18 August 1946 when it was still Italian territory and where more than 100 people died – do not have a statute of limitations. It is precisely in this perspective that we believe it is appropriate to set up a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry to shed full light on such tragic events and, through historical truth, arrive at a Memory that is known and shared by all. Our people, our people, have always been open and inclusive. These people have managed to rebuild their lives from a tragedy without breaking a window, without the slightest act of violence, eager to make people understand, in their pride, that it is right to remain in their own land, it is right to live in peace, it is right to be able to return, not as tourists but with due dignity, to the places we love, united with that land to which we are inextricably linked, despite every tragedy, disaster, and injustice.