With reference to the article “History rewritten in silence” appeared under the signature of Simonetta Fiori in the Tuesday 6 July edition of “Repubblica”, the Federation of Associations of Istrian, Fiume and Dalmatian Exiles intends to make some clarifications.

First of all, it is painful to note that the history of the eastern border is always interpreted in the context of fascism and the political attack on the right, forgetting centuries of Italian presence, history, culture and tradition on the eastern Adriatic coast, as well as the adhesion to the Risorgimento of native ruling classes and volunteers. It is necessary to distinguish the ideological and political reading that characterized the years of the Cold War from what actually happened.

To this we must add that the good-natured and idealized vision of communism that then transpires in this article clashes with the awareness, matured through direct experience in the associations of Adriatic exiles, that the red flag that the "Tito" army flaunted, covered an expansionist project aimed at areas inhabited for centuries by a majority of Italians, born and developed in Slovenian and Croatian nationalist environments in the final phase of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (well before the Slavophobic abuses carried out by the so-called border fascism).

Operating in Venezia Giulia, Fiume and Zara, which after the First World War belonged to Italy in an internationally recognized manner, the resistance led by Tito had transformed a struggle for liberation from a foreign occupation into an offensive aimed at establishing a Marxist dictatorship within the country and modifying the pre-war borders by taking advantage of the power vacuum that arose from the dissolution of the Italian state after September 8. Until the fall of fascism, which had already occurred on July 25, the lands on the eastern border had been as fascist as the rest of the country in the "years of consensus", but in the face of the Yugoslav insurrection it was difficult to hide one's past in regime organizations or possession of a party card, an indispensable condition for working in certain areas: that was enough to be considered "enemies of the people" to be eliminated.

The Yugoslav expansionist project, embellished by the rhetoric of building socialism, was joined by Italian communist partisan groups, willing to cede portions of national territory to a foreign power rather than remain within the borders of an Italy liberated from the Anglo-Americans and therefore destined to be aligned with the liberal-capitalist world. The partisans of the Osoppo Brigade who were against this scenario were eliminated at Malghe di Porzus by the Garibaldi Natisone Brigade, while units of the Decima Division, very autonomous within the ranks of the Italian Social Republic, stopped the Yugoslav militias that were approaching Gorizia as early as January 1945. Given what happened after the war ended in the capital of the Isonzo, from which over 660 people were deported by the "Titoites" and of whom nothing more was heard, it is understandable that the Municipality of Gorizia welcomed the veterans of that battle in the name of Italianness and not nostalgia.

: Italianness was the sentiment to which Vittorio Emanuele Orlando appealed when he opened the Constituent Assembly by invoking Italian Trieste, but it was a reference that the Communist Party often had to renounce because it was aligned with Soviet foreign policy. Italianness was the reason why in Gorizia as in Trieste, Pola, Fiume and Zara former partisans, anti-fascists and autonomists ended up on the proscription lists of the Ozna, Tito's secret police, together with fascists, collaborators and "enemies of the people" such as entrepreneurs, professionals and representatives of the Italian state (teachers, financiers, policemen, municipal officials). Italianness was the reason why in several waves over 300.000 Istrians, Fiume and Dalmatians abandoned the lands where they had lived rooted for centuries, but which had been occupied and then annexed by a dictatorship that could only accept a relic of Italian presence pigeonholed and manipulated in the rigid apparatus prepared by the Belgrade regime. After the political purge of the foibe, summary killings and concentration camps caused in various phases and ways about 10.000 victims, the ethnic cleansing represented by the Exodus followed. The arrogance and the fury with which these events are scaled down, decontextualized and reinterpreted by scholars who put ideological sympathy before the aseptic Weberian approach of the scientist, demonstrate where the political use of history actually flourishes.

While in the former Yugoslavia, foibe and places of summary killings carried out by Tito's communist regime against Slovenian and Croatian opponents continue to emerge, the deplorable banners that have appeared in recent days in Genoa – NO FOIBE NO PARTY – demonstrate how much further afield there is still to be travelled to reach a sincere and effective historical reconciliation.

 

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