An opinion by the historian professor Jože Pirjevec

In response to Croatian president Stipe Mesić's recent proposal of a reconciliation meeting involving him and his Slovene and Italian opposite numbers Türk and Napolitano, the Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini gave an interview that was published in the Trieste daily Il Piccolo on Monday 5 January. In the course of this interview he made the following statement: 'I have often said that Fascism was an absolute evil, but with the same frankness I have to insist that for too long we have forgotten about the actions of Tito's soldiers and the Communist forces, who were responsible for terrible massacres.' 

Allow me to analyse this sentence.

I agree with the minister that Fascism was an absolute evil. I cannot, however, agree with his assertion that the Italians have too long forgotten the 'terrible massacres' for which Tito's armed forces were responsible. As is well known, the first settling of scores occurred in Croatian Istria following the armistice of 8 September 1943, which entailed the capitulation of Italy. There followed a chaotic period of anarchy which people took advantage of, sometimes in conjunction with local partisans, to revenge themselves for long years of repression. Around 500 fascists and prominent local citizens were killed and thrown into pits in the ground. No sooner had German forces occupied Istria in early October, than these corpses were exhumed. This operation was carried out by firemen from Pula under the protection of the Wehrmacht and local collaborationist units.

While the Nazis and their collaborators killed approximately 2,500 people across Istria (Croats, Slovenes and Italians), all attention was focused on the victims of the slavocomunisti. Numerous articles about them appeared in Il Piccolo and two pamphlets featuring shocking photographs were published. These photographs appeared on the walls of Trieste (and, I assume, in every town in Istria) in order to denounce the barbarity of the Slavs. The matter also found an echo in the press of the Italian Social Republic (Salò), while at the same time it served Badoglio's government and those that followed it to denounce the Yugoslavs to the Anglo-American authorities and convince the latter to occupy the whole of the Julian March up to the Rapallo border with their own troops. Otherwise, they were to understand, a similar massacre would take place there.

The reality was different. On 1 May 1945, following fierce fighting at Villa Opicina and Basovizza, Tito's troops marched into Trieste and Gorizia and disarmed the local collaborationist units and also some members of local anti-fascist units who did not agree with the idea that the Rapallo border needed to be modified. Some hundreds of these people were shot immediately. Others were sent to assembly camps in the hinterland or to the prisons of Ljubljana, where they lived in terrible conditions. Many died of hunger and disease. Those who survived returned home in various stages.  The exploitation of these events for propaganda purposes began in Italy immediately after 12 June 1945, when Yugoslav troops withdrew from the western part of the Julian March and were replaced by the Anglo-Americans. The latter began digging in the mine shaft at Basovizza, but since they found nothing except a few mangled German corpses and some dead horses, they abandoned the project at the end of the year.

The investigation was continued by a group of speleologists from Trieste in cooperation with the police and extended to a number of karst chasms. Every find was covered by the local press, while the Trieste judiciary organised a few high-profile trials of infoibatori. The issue also served the Italian government at the time of the Paris peace conference in their efforts to secure as favourable as possible an 'eastern' border. After 1949 speleological explorations were no longer so frequent, but they did continue, sometimes in collaboration with the Italian army. Just what a topical issue the foibe were to remain over the next three decades is precisely illustrated over the course of 640 pages by Roberto Spazzali in his book Foibe: un dibattito ancora aperto. It was published in Trieste in 1990 by Lega Nazionale.

Spazzali was a prophet, since in the years that followed the debate over the foibe became even more intense. If before 1989 the remembrance service at Basovizza had only been attended by local dignitaries, that year the defence minister Valerio Zanone was among the participants. On the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima a delegation of the Italian Communist Party laid a wreath at the memorial for the first time, while in June 1991 the defence minister Virginio Rognoni did likewise. In November of that same year he was followed by Francesco Cossiga, the president of the republic, who asked forgiveness for the country's long silence.

A lively newspaper campaign followed in which Marco Pirina, a right-wing historian from Pordenone, played a prominent role with his 'Silentes Loquimur' study centre. In February 1993 the new president of the Italian Republic, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, sent a letter to the prime minister, Giuliano Amato, in which he requested the truth about the massacres. All of this was accompanied by a noisy media campaign which reached its peak in August 1996 when the secretary of the Trieste section of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), Stelio Spadaro, stated in an interview for the Corriere della Sera that his party, too, should regret the silence over the foibe. There followed a furious debate in which the most important Italian intellectuals took part.

The great majority of them were of the opinion that thousands of innocent people (between 10,000 and 50,000), killed merely for being Italians, had ended up in the foibe. Since this was evidently a matter of ethnic cleansing, or actually of genocide if not indeed a holocaust (crimes which never fall under the statute of limitations), in 1996 the Rome prosecutor Giuseppe Pititto launched a judicial investigation on the basis of Pirina's lists. This was supposed to counterbalance the trial of the German officer Erich Priebke, the man responsible for the Fosse Ardeatine massacre in Rome. In short, Tito's partisans were equated in guilt with the Nazis. The lawsuit, which in the end was narrowed down to just one man, Oskar Piskulić, an eighty-year-old resident of Rijeka, saw the participation not only of individuals but also of the Italian state, the comuni of Trieste and Gorizia and a range of official institutions. In the years that followed, an enormous newspaper campaign was mounted, only falling silent in 2003 when the court acquitted the accused of all charges. 

On the political scene at this time, besides Gianfranco Fini of the right-wing Alleanza Nazionale, two left-wingers, Luciano Violante and Piero Fassino, were particularly vocal, repeating well-worn phrases about a 'conspiracy of silence', 'too many indulgences towards Tito', the 'atrocity of the foibe', the 'Istrian genocide', etc. 

In late August 1996 Spadaro floated the idea of an act of reconciliation involving the two presidents, Scalfaro and Kučan. But in Italy there was not sufficient will for reconciliation, judging from what was written in the national and local press. By way of example I need quote just one headline: 'A massacre organised to wipe out a civilisation' (Il Giornale, 17 July 1997). In late February 2000, during a visit to Trieste, President Ciampi spoke about ethnic purges without mentioning the Fascist regime, while the following March the deputy Roberto Menia presented a motion to parliament calling for a special commemorative decoration for the relatives of the infoibati. In May of the same year Violante called for the history of the foibe to be taught in schools, while the report of the Italo-Slovene commission of historians, which was completed in this period, lay forgotten in a drawer at the Farnesina Palace [the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs].

The authorities in Rome did not appreciate the attempt by experts to place events within the framework of the history of the area in question from 1880 onwards, and to give them their proper dimensions. In 2002 Menia put forward the idea of a Day of Remembrance, while in 2003 Fini officially called for an apology for the silence on the part of the highest state institutions – a silence which had not existed for ten years. In September 2003 a square in Rapallo was dedicated to the 'martyrs of the foibe' and this example was followed by numerous Italian towns and cities. In 2004 the Italian parliament approved Menia's proposal of a day of remembrance, to be celebrated on 10 February, the day of the signing of the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty. Walter Veltroni, then mayor of Rome, visited the foiba at Basovizza and declared that a 'clarification' of history was needed.

The following year, 2005, brought Alberto Negrin's film Il cuore nel pozzo, while 2006 saw the adoption of a new citizenship act offering citizenship to the descendants of all Italian citizens of the territories 'abandoned' in Yugoslavia, and controversy over the list of infoibati from the Gorizia area which the Slovene authorities presented to their counterparts on the other side of the border. A notable event in 2007 was the speech by President Giorgio Napolitano, in which the former Communist leader assumed all the anti-Slav stereotypes of the Right. This was followed by the reply of [Croatian president] Stipe Mesić, which gave the media their cue to pontificate endlessly about the foibe. Last year, on the same occasion, the Italian president underlined the accuracy of his words. 

So much for the 'oblivion' referred to by Frattini.  

The article has been published in PRIMORSKI DNEVNIK (Trieste) on January 8, 2009