In recent weeks, the Slovenian press, reported by several national media outlets, has given wide coverage to the exhumation from mass graves, sinkholes, quarries and wells of the remains of poor victims, barbarically murdered by the communist regime of Marshal Tito in the aftermath of 1945.
It is not primarily a question of victims of Italian nationality, but of opponents of what the regime of the time considered an obstacle to the promulgation of Stalinism, that is: fighters opposed to Tito's partisans, non-communist anti-fascists, priests and nuns, children aged 14-17, housewives, farmers, workers.
Slovenia is dotted with approximately 600 such cavities.
The exhumation operation is a resounding slap in the face to all those who for years have accused the Associations of Istrian, Fiuman and Dalmatian Exiles of being mystifiers, falsifiers and revisionists, denying the very existence of the Foibe or asserting their marginal historical relevance.
The truth emerges like a river in flood and no preconceived ideology can now stop it.
But what is positively striking is that all this is happening after the visit of the two Presidents Mattarella and Pahor to the Basovizza sinkhole on 13 July.
A visit that much short-sightedness, innate or induced, had focused on with some rearguard polemics, but which for those who participated could only be placed in its proper perspective.
In the Republic of Slovenia, a social and cultural process has been underway for some time now, aimed at making justice for the wrongs that the post-war communist regime has caused, and the visit to Basovizza, contested in Pahor in his homeland by a minority of opposing views to ours in Italy, has opened, as expected, a new season in relations between the two States.
It is a season within which the Slovenian authorities make themselves available, at the request of the Italian Government, to the exhumation of the many bodies still buried in mass graves.
We ask the Presidency of the Republic that has supported us in all these years, the President of the Council of Ministers, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and all the institutions involved, to support the Associations of Exiles in the request for the exhumation of the bodies, as well as in the request to place crosses and tombstones in those places of death.
A modern civilization has the obligation to treasure memory in order to build a perspective of peace between different peoples who have always coexisted in regions of great beauty and great fragility.

Antonio Ballarin
President of the Federation of Associations of Istrian, Rijeka and Dalmatian Exiles

Source: http://www.federesuli.org/2020/09/02/prime-importanti-conseguenze-causate-dalla-storica-visita-alla-foiba-di-basovizza-dei-presidenti-di-italia-e-slovenia/