On Saturday, 10 February 2024, Giorgia Meloni paid tribute to the victims of the Foibe massacres, perpetrated by Yugoslavian communists during and just after WWII, in a solemn ceremony at the Foiba in Basovizza. This fact alone is newsworthy, because it is the first time that an Italian prime minister has attended a ceremony in memory of the thousands of Italians killed and the hundreds of thousands who had to go into exile. “I came here as a child,” Meloni recalled, “when few did, because it meant being singled out, accused, isolated.” The victims were forgotten and the exiles were repudiated in their own country for decades. The official remembrance came only twenty years ago. With her presence, Meloni wanted to settle a historical debt: “The homeland is the family of the heart; so you, who have defended and loved this homeland and thus contributed to building it, are our family.”
Istria, Fiume, and Dalmatia—where there was a majority Italian population—were incorporated into Italy after the end of World War I. But after the defeat of fascism, they were integrated into Yugoslavia in February of 1947 as a result of the Paris Peace Treaties. Consequently, the Italian population was forced to leave their lands and homes. In what became known as the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus, some 300,000-350,000 Italians left the region. For example, the town of Pola (now Pula, in Croatia) had 33,000 inhabitants in February 1947; but, after the exodus, only 3,000 people remained.
The Italians were well aware of what awaited them under communist rule, because they had suffered persecution at the hands of Tito’s partisans since late 1943. In the early post-war years, the partisans murdered thousands of Italian civilians in a campaign of ethnic cleansing—men, women and children, under the pretext that they were “supporters” of fascism. Figures vary from 5,000 to 10,000 killed, although some historians put the number as high as 15,000. The victims were shot or thrown alive into natural sinkholes called “foibe,” which are abundant in the region: there are more than 1,700 in the Istria area alone, and some are up to 200 metres deep.
Among the thousands of victims, there are several names that symbolise the horror of what happened in the foibe. Among them are two priests, Angelo Tarticchio and Francesco Bonifacio. Father Tarticchio, parish priest of Villa di Rovigno in Istria, was arrested by the partisans in September 1943. He was tortured, killed, and thrown with 43 other prisoners into the Lindaro quarry. His body was found two months later, completely naked and castrated, with a crown of barbed wire on his head. Father Boniface, chaplain of Villa Gardossi in Istria, was arrested on 11 September 1946 by the People’s Guards. He was tortured, stoned, and stabbed, and his body, which was never recovered, was thrown into the Martines foiba. On 4 October 2008, Father Bonifacio was beatified in Trieste by Benedict XVI.
But if there is one face and one name that embodies the foibe for Italians, it is that of Norma Cossetto, a 23-year-old student who was imprisoned for refusing to collaborate with the partisans and inform on her compatriots. She was repeatedly tortured and raped and, on 5 October 1943, the partisans cut off her breasts before throwing her alive into a pit along with three dozen other prisoners. Her remains were exhumed just a week later. The image of the smiling young woman has become a symbol of her victory over her killers, and streets and plaques throughout Italy bear her name. Yet for this to happen, more than 60 years had to pass.
Despite the Foibe and Bleiburg, and the many other crimes committed during and after the war by the Yugoslav communists, the Western powers saw in Tito’s government a potential ally. Tito did not want Yugoslavia to become a satellite of the Soviet Union, and consequently it did not join the Warsaw Pact. The Italian government ignored the uncomfortable testimonies of returnees and forgot the foibe, the victims, and the exiles. It forgot them to the point that, on 2 October 1969, the man most responsible for the massacres and the exile, Marshal Tito, was awarded the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic by the socialist president Giuseppe Saragat. Moreover, those who dared to remember the foibe—as Meloni pointed out in Buzzovina—were branded as radicals and fascists.
Everything changed in 2004. That year, under the government of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian parliament established 10 February as “Remembrance Day” to remember those killed in the Foibe massacre and the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus. A year later, Italian RAI television premiered Il Cuore nel Pozzo (The Heart in the Well), a film that tells the story of Italian children fleeing from Tito’s partisans. The film was broadcast in two parts on 6 and 7 February, and again on 10 February (in a shortened version), to celebrate Remembrance Day. Seventeen million Italians saw the film, and many discovered for the first time the forgotten tragedy of their history. That same year, Italian President Carlo Ciampi posthumously awarded the Gold Medal for Civil Merit to Norma Cossetto. In 2011, the cities of Trieste and Terni dedicated a street to her, and, since then, ever more cities have inaugurated streets and installed commemorative plaques either with her name or dedicated to the martyrs of the foibe. At the end of 2018, a new film about the foibe massacres, Rosso Istria (Red Land), was released and won an award at the Venice Film Festival. Italy recovered its lost memory.
However, some have wanted to keep the memory of the foibe buried with its victims. Although the Italian Left initially condemned ethnic cleansing, different sectors, particularly the communists, were quick to denounce the Remembrance Day as an historical manipulation aimed at criminalising anti-fascism. Consequently, they have promoted a negationism that justifies the crimes or minimises the number of victims. In addition, the extreme Left has carried out a permanent campaign of vandalism and mockery against monuments dedicated to the foibe. For example, in March 2021, an anti-fascist collective wallpapered Genoa with posters and stickers with the message “No foibe, no party.” This year, while left-wing radicals demonstrated in Turin under the slogan, “From the Yugoslav partisans to the Palestinian resistance: [we’re] on the right side of history,” the plaque dedicated to the victims in Florence was damaged for the second time in a few days—and it was also attacked in January and October 2023.
The victims of the foibe massacres are an uncomfortable reality for the Left, and neither Elly Schlein of the Democratic Party nor Giuseppe Conte of the 5 Star Movement mentioned Remembrance Day. Their rejection is also making itself felt in their reluctance to remove the honours of the Yugoslav dictator. Tito has been a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic since 1969, an honour that Fratelli d’Italia and Lega consider an insult to the victims. In February 2023, Walter Rizzetto (Fratelli d’Italia) presented a bill to change the rule establishing the Order of the Knights of the Republic, according to which the honour cannot be cancelled for people who have died in the meantime. And just a few days ago, the Constitutional Affairs Committee debated Rizzetto’s bill and two others by Massimiliano Panizzut (Lega) and Fabio Rampelli (Fratelli d’Italia). All of them are aimed at removing the legal obstacles that have prevented the removal of Tito’s honour. However, as was the case a week earlier, the committee has not been able to send a final text to be voted on in the Chamber because of obstacles put in the way by the Democratic Party. It seems that, for the moment, it is not yet possible to reverse the infamous decision taken by the Italian socialists in 1969.
Tito’s medal is the last obstacle to repairing the decades of silence and concealment of the victims of the foibe. Removing Tito’s honour is a duty to all of the victims, after “unforgivable decades” of silence, as Giorgia Meloni pointed out in Basovizza. The Day of Remembrance has been a fundamental tool to make Italians aware of this tragic part of their history and, above all, to put an end to the hypocritical distinction between first- and second-class victims. The remembrance is an historical memory “not to reopen the wounds of the past, not to divide again, but to close a circle, to heal that shame and repair that feeling of solidarity on which every nation is founded.”
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/italy-remembers-the-foibe/