Rome, Palazzo Madama, Friday 9 February 2018, 17.00 pm 

 

Mr President of the Republic,

Mr. President of the Senate,

Representatives of Parliament and Government,

Authority,

Ladies and Gentlemen.

 

On February 10, 1947, as is well known, that ill-fated Peace Treaty between Italy and the victorious powers was signed in Paris, that diktat , which sanctioned the mutilation of the national territory. In addition to the Colonies, along with Briga and Tenda to the west, Italy lost almost all of Venezia Giulia to the east, with the cities of Pola, Fiume, Zara, and 80% of the provinces of Gorizia and Trieste.

From the outset it was clear that the 90 articles of the Treaty were meant to be a punitive peace. Italy could not object. American President Wilson had proposed a “line” for the Italian-Yugoslavian border that left almost all of Istria to Italy, but it was rejected in 47 by the victorious powers because it was too “benevolent” towards Italy. The French proposal prevailed, which, although it did not satisfy all of Tito's demands, mortified all of Italy's expectations.

All of Italy had lost the war, but those who paid the highest price were the Julian, Istrian, Fiume, and Dalmatian peoples. Both those who were forced to choose the path of exile and those who remained in the territories ceded by Italy, our national community, the only indigenous Italian minority. The so-called – improperly – “remainers” had to suffer serious consequences because of their Italian ethnicity.

It was out of desperation that 71 years ago the last Julian exiles embarked from Pola, abandoning all their possessions, renouncing their entire past and putting their future in doubt. It was the final act of a diaspora that began in '44 from Zara and then from Fiume, to escape the massacre of the foibe and to remain Italian. The war had long since ended everywhere, but not here.

The other cities of Italy had already seen American soldiers march, welcomed with generous hugs and shouts of joy. But here, here alone, the war had begun again, more atrocious than before: the soldiers marching through Pola, Fiume, Zara were not celebrating, they spoke Croatian and wore uniforms with the red star. They did not bring liberation but a new dictatorship. With the end of fascism, communism arrived. With the end of Italy, Yugoslavia arrived, and ethnic cleansing. The foibe. Fear.

My father, Mario, who as a reckless boy, heedless of the partisan patrols, climbed ever higher on the ancient stones of the Arena of Pola with the Italian flag folded in his pocket, to then let it swell freely in the wind. Luckily for him, no one looked up at that moment, otherwise I would not be here today.

My mother, Anita, who in 1947, at the age of 14, had to flee her home at night together with her twelve-year-old brother Nazario, to then be hidden in the hold of a ship, and undertake a very risky journey to protect them from the fury of the Nazi occupation and the violence of the partisans.

For 70 years our exiles were accused of being fascists, but they were “only” as proudly Italian. More precisely, they were “doubly Italian”: they were by birth but they were also by choice, having confirmed it with the painful choice of exodus. A forced choice because they were faced with the alternative of having to deny their Italianness, their ideals, their culture, their Christian faith. This last aspect has always been spoken very little, and only in the last ten years, after the beatification of Don Francesco Bonifacio and Don Miroslav Bulesic, have historians begun to denounce the intimidation, violence and killings of many priests who paid for their faith with their lives. Following a precise project of de-Christianization, state employees were prohibited from publicly professing their religion (going to mass, having their children baptized, celebrating marriage), under penalty of immediate dismissal.

The exodus led to the abandonment of cities, villages and countryside. The Italians were reduced to a small minority, often victims of Yugoslav nationalism, or rather chauvinism, which targeted the “different”.

The exodus of the vast majority of Italians, which literally emptied the coastal and inland towns, the arrival of people from other Yugoslav republics, the process of Yugoslavization engineered by government bodies, with the intent of erasing the historical, cultural and linguistic peculiarities of the region - which would have contributed significantly to the subsequent assimilation - were not small problems. The remaining Italians had to create suitable structures to safeguard their being. The Yugoslav government tried in various ways to transform the Italian component of Istria into a mere folkloristic phenomenon.

It is they, the exiles, who today tell what it means, out of the blue, to close the house and leave, taking with you only what fits in a bag, and knowing full well that in a few hours someone else will enter those rooms, theirs, our rooms, and take possession of them. They will sleep in our bed and eat from our plates.

The black-and-white images show us heartbreaking embraces between children who left and parents who stayed behind, unable to sever their roots, made fatalistic by age. Many never met again. Others, despite their age, braved the journey and spent their final years in a refugee camp: Italy sometimes accepted them reluctantly, at least the Italy that believed, " If they flee communism, they must be fascists."

Remembrance Day re-establishes a truth and compensates, to a minimum, for the despair of not being believed.

The exodus and the foibe were taboo subjects, on which the First Republic had placed a tombstone, undoubtedly because they recalled the defeat suffered, but also because of the role played by the communist partisans.

It is well known, in fact, that in October 1944, after receiving Tito's emissaries (Kardelj and Gilas) in Rome, Palmiro Togliatti gave Vincenzo Bianco, the PCI representative in Venezia Giulia, the order to " promote the occupation of the Julian Region by Marshal Tito's troops ." Arrests and killings were concentrated above all in urban centers, particularly Trieste, Fiume, and Gorizia.

The Italian Republic is also founded on the partisan struggle, conducted by men and women, even just adolescents, who put the liberation of the country from dictatorships before their own lives. The entire country is grateful to these heroes of ours.

However, I believe the time is ripe to share further pages of our country's history.

We cannot and must not forget that, with some praiseworthy exceptions, the Italian communist partisans on the eastern border did not fight to liberate Italy from the Nazi-fascist yoke, but rather to subjugate it with force and violence, with the death of those who opposed them, to a brutal Soviet-communist nationalism, to a new dictatorship. Partisans who operated outside the CLN against the Allies, in the name of an anti-Italian and pro-Soviet internationalism. The declared intent was to absorb the Italian partisan Brigades and Battalions into the Yugoslavian army, purging them of the presence of those Italians guilty of having taken up arms against Marshal Tito's troops.

In Gorizia, after the war, over 650 people from Gorizia were taken away from their homes and families, never to return, for the sole “guilt” of being Italian-minded, patriots who could have represented an obstacle to Marshal Tito’s will to annex. A similar fate befell hundreds of Italian sisters and brothers from Trieste.

The eastern border is still waiting for the Institutions and the ANPI to recognize the role played by the Italian communist partisans in helping Tito's communists in these operations of roundup, deportation and killing. Recognizing this would be a very important step, which some provincial ANPI Committees in Italy have already taken individually.

The Italian State has rightly condemned the attempt at denationalization imposed by fascism on the Slovenian-speaking populations living on the border. Now we await an effort of truth, in the interest of the partisan movement itself, which does not deserve to be lumped together with those who fought and killed Italians with the aim of subjecting Italy to a new dictatorship.

We must also fight those who, knowingly, are carrying out a campaign that tends to deny, minimize or justify the tragedy of the foibe and the exodus, considered an understandable reaction to the responsibilities of fascism. Woe betide anyone who justifies violence, which must be condemned always and in any case, otherwise we should justify those who today should exercise violence against the foibators of yesterday!

Whoever still denies, minimizes or justifies the tragedy of the foibe and the exodus must be marginalized also through the extension of the aggravating circumstance foreseen for Holocaust denial.

Where 100 years ago different nationalisms fought against each other, bloodying the Isonzo river, sacred to the Fatherland, where 72 years ago the Julian lands suffered, at the end of the war, the roundups and killing of many civilians by Marshal Tito's troops aided by the Italian communist partisans, where until a few decades ago the land was divided by the last offshoot of the infamous "iron curtain", right there today the Municipality of Gorizia, of which I am proudly Mayor, together with the Slovenian municipalities of Nova Gorica and Šempeter-Vrtojba, speak of cohesion and growth, referring no longer to our individual municipalities alone, but to a larger territory: that territory that the stupidity of Man has tormented and that the intelligence and heart of Man today make grow together.

Honourable Presidents, the Julian-Dalmatian exiles and their descendants can and want to make an important contribution to that Europe of peoples and not of bureaucrats that we all want to help build, enriched by diversity, strengthened by having suffered more than others from unjust borders erected by barbarity and now torn down by foresight.

With these sentiments of gratitude, Mr. President of the Republic, Mr. President of the Senate, Authorities, Ladies and Gentlemen, we renew our most sincere thanks for having allowed us to remember in this place the tragedy of the foibe and the exodus. Long live Italy!