Considering the importance of the event that took place on July 13th in Trieste, we anticipate in part the intervention on the matter by the President of the Society of Fiumani Studies Giovanni Stelli, whose article will be published in the next special issue of the Adriatic studies magazine “FIUME”

REFLECTIONS ON THE SIDE

MATTARELLA AND PAHOR IN BASOVIZZA, CROATIA AND THE EUROPEAN DAY OF COMMEMORATION OF THE VICTIMS OF TOTALITARIAN REGIMES

 The Basovizza ceremony on July 13 with Mattarella and Pahor

On July 13th of this year, as widely reported by all the mass media, the President of the Italian Republic Sergio Mattarella and the President of the Republic of Slovenia Borut Pahor, holding hands, laid a wreath of flowers on the Basovizza sinkhole and then repeated the gesture in front of the

monument to the fallen Slovenians, a monument that a short distance from the foiba commemorates four young Slavs sentenced to death by the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State and shot on 6 September 1930. The choice of date was obviously not accidental: on 13 July 1920 the fascists set fire to the Narodny Dom, the home of the Slovenian people of Trieste, which on this occasion, by virtue of a memorandum of understanding signed by the two presidents, was returned to the Slovenian community in Italy. In his speech Mattarella said:

The painful experiences endured by the people of these lands are not forgotten. Precisely for this reason the present time and the future call […] to make a choice between making those sufferings endured on both sides the sole object of our thoughts, cultivating feelings of rancor, or on the contrary making them a common heritage in memory and respect, developing collaboration, friendship, sharing of the future. On both sides of the border, whose meaning of separation is now fortunately overcome by the effect of the common choice of integration into the European Union, on both sides of the border Slovenians and Italians are decidedly for the second path, aimed at the future. In the name of values ​​that are now common: freedom, democracy, peace.

The Slovenian President, addressing "dear President and friend Mattarella, dear Slovenian compatriots, dear Italian friends", expressed his “immense joy” because  “the wrong has been righted, justice has been done,” and on this “celebratory day […] we are celebrating together, Italy and Slovenia, a shared enterprise”, which has a historical significance:

Today, as someone said, we live those forbidden dreams that come true, as if after a hundred years all the stars had aligned. But they didn't do it by themselves, we did it.

The ceremony concluded in the Prefecture, where the two presidents signed the aforementioned memorandum of understanding on the restitution of the Narodny Dom to the Slovenian community and awarded the Slovenian writer from Trieste Boris Pahor the Italian honor of Cavaliere di Gran Croce della Repubblica and the Slovenian honor of the Order for Exceptional Merit. The writer, who turned 107 in August, wanted to dedicate "the honors to all the dead I knew in the concentration camp and to the victims of Nazi-fascism and the communist dictatorship."

The ceremony of July 13th is the conclusion of a long process of "reconciliation" that began in October 1993, when, following an exchange of notes between the Italian, Slovenian and Croatian governments, two mixed historical-cultural commissions were established, one Italian-Slovenian and one Italian-Croatian, with the mandate to "carry out a comprehensive research and examination of all relevant aspects of political questions".

and bilateral cultural events during this century". The Italian-Slovenian commission concluded its work in 2000 with a joint final report which expressed itself as follows on the crucial issue of the foibe[1]:

 

10. […] The extension of Yugoslavian control from the areas previously liberated by the partisan movement to the entire territory of Venezia Giulia was greeted with great enthusiasm by the majority of Slovenes and by the Italians who were in favour of Yugoslavia. For the Slovenes it was a double liberation, from the German occupiers and from the Italian state. On the contrary, the Julians who were in favour of Italy considered the Yugoslavian occupation as the darkest moment in their history, also because it It was accompanied in the Trieste, Gorizia and Capodistria areas by a wave of violence which found expression in the arrest of many thousands of people, – mostly Italian, but also Slovenian, against the Yugoslav communist political project –, some of whom were released on several occasions; in hundreds of immediate summary executions – whose victims were generally thrown into the "foibe"; in the

deportation of a large number of soldiers and civilians, some of whom died of hardship or were liquidated during the transfers, in prisons and prison camps (among which the one in Borovnica should be mentioned), created in various areas of Yugoslavia.

11. These events occurred in a climate of reckoning for fascist and war violence and appear to be largely the fruit of a preordained political project, in which various drives converged: the commitment to eliminate individuals and structures linked (even beyond personal responsibilities) to fascism, Nazi domination, collaborationism and the Italian State, together with a plan for the preventive purge of real, potential or presumed opponents, in light of the advent of the communist regime and the annexation of Venezia Giulia to the new Yugoslav stateThe initial impulse for the repression came from a revolutionary movement that was transforming itself into a regime, thus converting the widespread national and ideological animosity among the partisan cadres into state violence.

Naturally, with regard to an official document signed by both parties, and therefore inevitably to some extent also politically "agreed", it is always possible to advance reservations and motivated criticisms, but the judgment that connects the foibe and, more generally, the communist repression "to a plan for preventive purge" marked a decisive step in the direction of "reconciliation" between Italy and Slovenia and, more generally, between Italians and Slavs of the border lands of the eastern Adriatic.

This journey had an official seal on 20 July 2010: in Trieste the presidents of the republics of Italy, Slovenia and Croatia went, to pay a joint homage, to some historical places of the twentieth century conflicts between opposing nationalisms: the seat of the Narodny Dom and the monument in memory of the exodus of Italians from Istria, Fiume and Zara after the Second World War. The event ended, as is known, with the concert for peace conducted by Riccardo Muti.

It is in the light of these precedents that the significance of the ceremony of 13 July this year must be considered and its importance must be acknowledged, which cannot be underestimated. The Slovenian President is in fact the first statesman of the former Yugoslavia who paid homage to the Basovizza sinkhole victims. This means that also for Slovenia the anti-Italian repression promoted by Tito's communist forces and culminating in the tragedy of the foibe is now an undeniable truth. Thus a ideological mortgage which prevented, in this case especially the Slovenians, from fully coming to terms with the Yugoslav communist past, with that totalitarian system whose repressive methods also caused deaths and suffering to the Slovenians themselves (and to the Croats) often to a greater extent than that suffered by the Italians[2].

From this point of view, the ceremony of 13 July can be considered as a concrete application of the resolution approved on 19 September last year by the European Parliament in Strasbourg (535 votes in favour, 66 against and 52 abstentions) “The importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe”, which speaks of the “recognition of the common European legacy of the crimes committed by communist, Nazi and other dictatorships” and remembers how “Nazi and Communist regimes committed mass murder, genocide and deportations, causing, during the 20th century, losses of human life and freedom on a scale unprecedented in human history"[3]. On this resolution – not by chance silenced by those "Europeanists" enthusiastic about economic union and always ready to applaud European positions in favor of "political correctness" and also criticized by some with an intellectualistic arrogance equal only to the poverty of the arguments[4] – we promise to return to the pages of this Journal to make the full text known and to critically analyze its contents.

 The reasons of politics and the reasons of history

As with the final report of the Italian-Slovenian Commission, also for the ceremony of July 13 it is not only possible, but necessary to raise some reservations on the merits. Political decisions are in fact inevitably the result of a compromise between diverging sensibilities, motivations and interests. The reasons of politics therefore – even when, as in this case, they are at the basis of a “high” political vision and of an event that can well be defined as “historical” – do not always agree and cannot even agree with the reasons of history.

Comparing the foibati to the four young Slavs shot in Basovizza in 1930 is, for example, unsustainable. And this not only, as is obvious, on a quantitative level, but

also on the merits. The four executed were in fact members of the nationalist organization TIGR, which claimed for the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which in 1929 became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Trieste, Istria, Gorizia and Fiume (hence the acronym TIGR: Trst, Istra, Gorica, Rijeka). The TIGR organization theorized and practiced terrorism with actions such as the attack on the Victory Lighthouse and the newspaper The people of Trieste which resulted in one death and three injuries, which any sovereign State would have tried to repress. One can of course discuss the meaning of these actions, manifestations in any case of a nationalist rather than anti-fascist ideology, and the death sentences handed down by the Fascist Special Tribunal, but it is clear that all this cannot be compared to the indiscriminate repression, conducted without trials, without any determination of individual responsibility and, moreover, with regard to the foibe of 1945, after the war had ended, of which the foibe are the tragic emblem.

The episode of Narodny Dom should then be reconstructed taking into account the clash between opposing nationalisms. The fire of 13 July 1920 at the Balkan Hotel, where the Slovenian People's House was located, occurred two days after the serious incidents in Split, where two Italian sailors had been killed by Croatian nationalists, and after bloody clashes that had occurred on the same day in Trieste in which an Italian officer also lost his life. Contextualising - an invitation that has often resounded in recent years in a one-way direction, that is, only in relation to the issue of the foibe - does not at all mean justifying and not even, in this case, minimising the responsibilities of fascism in the fire of Narodny Dom, which Mussolini enthusiastically praised as “the masterpiece of Trieste fascism”.

A discordant note in the July 13 ceremony was struck after the awarding of honors to Boris Pahor[5]. If the writer's statement on the victims of Nazism and Communism, cited above, was in tune with the spirit of the demonstration, things are very different with what Pahor immediately afterwards felt he had to say to the microphones of the private broadcaster Telequattro: “the president received my letter, I was telling a dirty story about the Day of Remembrance, February 20. An attack on the Yugoslavian army, which caused I don't know how many Italians to be thrown into the sinkholes: it's all a lie, it wasn't true at all”[6]. Beyond the broken Italian, probably attributable to his age, because Pahor knows our language very well, the ambiguous reference to the "president" (the Italian or the Slovenian one?) and the wrong date of the Day of Remembrance, the only thing that is absolutely clear is that, according to our man, the foibe are "a lie", from which it follows that the Italian and Slovenian presidents would have paid homage to a symbolic place that does not exist, indeed fraudulent, as is claimed by the few, but very active, nostalgics of Yugoslavian communism. Senator Gasparri was not wrong to propose to remove the honor conferred on him from the writer, it must be recognized, incautiously[7].

          Boris Pahor, a victim of both totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, but animated by an unsurpassed anti-Italian hatred of which the declaration just mentioned is only the latest example, should perhaps be humbly reminded of the lesson of the Italian writer, Istrian exile, Fulvio Tomizza, who in 1986 dedicated a painful novel to the sufferings of the Slovenes of Trieste, The newlyweds of via Rossetti, "“composing”, as Giovanni Raboni wrote, “the rights of compassion with the demands of truth”.

Ironically, it is recent news, from August 24, of the discovery of a new sinkhole in Slovenia, in the area of ​​Kočevski Rog, containing the remains of about 250 victims. The excavation had been authorized at the end of last May by the Slovenian State Commission that deals with the killings committed by the communists in 1945. The speleologists “descended into the abyss 68 times and carried out a total of 91 lifts with 137 loads. It took three full days to bring all the human remains to the surface. […] [A]lso the remains, spoons, combs, personal objects, mirrors, a rosary, holy images and about 400 buttons were found”[8].

Croatia and the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes

An objective limit of the July 13 ceremony is constituted by theabsence of the Republic of Croatia, the third protagonist - as the successor state of the dissolved Yugoslavia - of the process of reconciliation between Italians and Slavs of the lands of the eastern Adriatic. It should be remembered in this regard that the mixed Italian-Croatian commission, established in October 1993 together with the Italian-Slovenian one, unlike the latter, never entered into function and therefore did not produce any joint document.

Nevertheless, from the 1990s to the present day, important steps have been taken in the direction of dialogue and overcoming the barriers between Italians and Croats erected by opposing nationalisms and totalitarianisms during the twentieth century in relations with Croatia. The promoter of this dialogue with the remaining Italian citizens of Fiume – organised in the local Community within the Italian Union – and with the institutions of the current Croatian majority – first and foremost the Municipality of Fiume-Rijeka – has been the Society of Fiumani Studies, and the results obtained so far have been of undoubted importance. We will limit ourselves to recalling the most significant ones here, starting with the fundamental research conducted jointly by our Society and the Croatian Institute for History in Zagreb (Hrvatski Institut za Povijest Zagreb) on The victims of Italian nationality in Fiume and its surroundings (1939-1947) / Žrtve talijanske nacionalnosti u Rijeci i okolici (1939.-1947.). The results of the research were published under this title in 2002 in a volume of almost 700 pages, edited by Amleto Ballarini and Mihael Sobolevski, published by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities – General Directorate for Archives in the series of “Publications of the State Archives – Subsidies”, and officially presented in Zagreb and Rome. This is an exemplary research, both in terms of method and of the data collected, which should be extended to other areas, in Istria and Dalmatia, affected by Nazi-Fascist and Communist repression, especially in the years 1943-1947.

Over the years, we have reported on the numerous cultural initiatives – conferences, prizes for students of Italian schools in Fiume, meetings, collaborations and so on – directly or indirectly addressed to the city of origin in the Newsletter included with each issue of this Magazine. Here we should at least mention the most recent event that has historical importance in the evolution of relations between Italy and Croatia: on 5 July 2018, the bodies of Senator Riccardo Gigante and other Italians murdered by the Yugoslav communist political police on 3 May 1945 in Castua were exhumed – including the journalist Nicola Marzucco, the Marshal of the Guardia di Finanza, Vito Butti[9] and the vice-brigadier of the Carabinieri, Alberto Diana – and thrown into a mass grave discovered by Amleto Ballarini with the help of the parish priest of Castua, Don Franjo Jurčević, in the nearby Loza forest. It was an act of justice that crowned a long and tenacious battle waged since the nineties by our Society, and which came to a successful conclusion thanks to the support of Italian and Croatian personalities and institutions – including the Croatian parish priest of Castua, Don Franjo Jurčević, Senator Maurizio Gasparri, the Italian consul in Rijeka, Paolo Palminteri, and Federesuli – and of course thanks to the fundamental collaboration between the Italian and Croatian Ministries of Defense. The epilogue of the story – of which we published an extensive account in the previous issue of the Magazine – took place on February 15 of this year with a solemn ceremony at the Vittoriale degli Italiani organized by the president of the Vittoriale Foundation Giordano Bruno Guerri: Gigante's body, together with the remains of his companions, was buried in the Ark that awaited the patriot from Fiume, prepared by d'Annunzio.

An important step in the work of recovering the historical memory devastated by communist totalitarianism is finally constituted by the recent placing by the Municipality of Fiume-Rijeka of a series of bilingual historical tables in the Old Town in which the ancient Italian street names from the eighteenth century are recovered. This operation was carried out with the cooperation of the local Italian Community and of our Society which has made available to the Municipality the fundamental Street map of Fiume by Massimo Superina, published in 2015 by the Society of Fiumani Studies – Historical Museum Archive of Rijeka.

But there is more: the Republic of Croatia has recently given concrete application of the European Parliament resolution on the crimes of Nazi and Communist dictatorships, mentioned above. The August 23th – proclaimed by the Strasbourg Parliament European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes – the President of the Croatian Government, Andrej Plenković, paid tribute to the victims of the terrible gulag established in 1949 by Tito's communist regime on Goli Otok. Plenković – accompanied by Deputy Prime Minister Tomo Medved and Minister Oleg Butković – laid a wreath at the foot of the memorial plaque in memory of the victims and said: “Today we are here to honor the victims of the communist regime, which was one of the totalitarian regimes that characterized the 20th century, also in Croatia.".

Professor Zvonko Kusić, special advisor to the Prime Minister, stressed that “one of the basic principles” of the current Croatian government, as well as a principle adopted by the Committee for Comparison with the Past established by the government itself, is that no crime can be justified by other crimes committed previously and that “no political goal can justify the crimes that have been committed”. On the same day, another important ceremony was held in Macelj, where 130 caves transformed into mass graves, from the largest of which 1.250 victims of communist repression were exhumed, including 21 priests. In one of these caves, the remains of 82 people were discovered last January. Damir Borovčak of the Macelj 1945 association recalled the principle that inspires his association: “No hatred, no revenge, we just want the truth to be made public”[10]. This news, naturally made public by the government, however did not find much echo in the Croatian media, not to mention the European and Italian ones, which preferred to ignore it, confirming the "double standards" still prevalent in the dominant culture.

John Stelli

Continued in the FIUME Magazine nr. 43/ 2020 October issue which can be requested at info@fiume-rijeka.it