The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Antonio Tajani, spoke at the celebrations for the Remembrance Day, in commemoration of the victims of the foibe and of the Istrian, Fiuman and Dalmatian exodus.
Speech by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Antonio Tajani
Mr President of the Republic,
Authorities,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
the celebration of the Remembrance Day, held in this solemn venue of the Quirinale Palace, is an important event, full of emotion and significance for the entire national community.
The Remembrance Day, desired and established by the Berlusconi government in 2004, confronts us with a tragic page in national history. A page characterized by the martyrdom of so many innocent people, but also by the forced exodus from their homes and lands of hundreds of thousands of human beings only guilty of being Italian.
Today is a day dedicated to remembering those broken lives and traumatic events: remembrance – and I want to reiterate this word – which means recollection, tribute to memory, reflection on a past that cannot be forgotten so that it never happens again.
“Remembrance” therefore means neither recrimination nor revanchism. Our neighbours to the east, the countries born from the dissolution of the Yugoslav State, clearly bear no responsibility for what happened, both because – for our legal and moral civilisation – responsibility is always personal and is not passed down through generations, and above all because those countries are in no way continuers of the communist regime of Tito and his successors.
Slovenia and Croatia, instead, are our partners and friends in the new Europe that we are laboriously building. They share our principles of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. They are our valuable partners in the policy of special attention that Italy is paying to the Balkans, hoping for the accession to the European Union and the Atlantic Alliance of the countries in the region that are not yet members.
Just today, at Villa Madama, I will host a meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the Group of Friends of the Balkans, which we contributed to creating precisely to accompany the countries of the region on the path to reunification with the European family.
In this initial phase of the new European institutional cycle, we strongly wanted the important presence of the European institutions precisely to reaffirm this message of fraternal embrace to the region. I am personally delighted that EU High Representative Kallas and EU Commissioner for Enlargement Kos immediately accepted my invitation with enthusiasm.
Moreover, the historic handshake with Slovenian President Pahor, whom You, Mr President of the Republic, wished to meet at the foiba of Basovizza, the symbolic site of that great tragedy, showed – in the most solemn way – the rediscovered brotherhood of the two peoples.
Ideological fanaticism and the brutality of war had torn apart the unity of a territory in which Italian, Slavic and Germanic peoples had coexisted peacefully and prospered for many centuries.
This makes us reflect on the severity of a senseless action that offends the memory of the victims. I am obviously referring to the action of a single provocateur who, in recent days, desecrated the site of the foiba of Basovizza, an act that not only outrages the fallen but also reopens painful wounds in the living.
This is the reason why I want to reaffirm my strongest condemnation of an intolerable and unjustifiable act.
Fortunately an isolated one since the spirit that marks relations not only between States, but also between peoples is – thank goodness – profoundly different. It is a spirit that can be found in the deep feeling and emotion with which we can cross the Piazza della Transalpina in Gorizia, for so long an emblem of division and today, instead, a symbol of openness and unity. Where the barbed wire of one of Europe’s most heavily guarded and lacerating borders ran, today only a line on the ground recalls the pain of separation.
The fact that Gorizia and Nova Gorica have been chosen together to play the role of European Capital of Culture this year honours a place of great cultural prestige, in which so many literary and artistic expressions were born or developed. At the same time it enhances the common identity of a city that its being both Italian and Slovenian defines as a place of encounter, exchange, as well as a happy synthesis of peoples, trade, ideas, faith and shared values.
Your Presence, Mr. President, at the inauguration ceremony, together with Slovenian President Musar, pays the highest tribute to this very important initiative.
Mister President, ladies and gentlemen,
the victims of the foibe tragedy are estimated to be over four thousand. The Istrian-Dalmatian refugees exiled from their lands, from the lands of their fathers, were over three hundred and fifty thousand.
These are the numbers of an ethnic cleansing, perpetrated in the name of two aberrations typical of the 20th century, namely exaggerated nationalism and communism.
Ethnic cleansing because they were innocent victims, or only guilty of having an Italian surname, of speaking the Italian language, of feeling Italian. A hard-working population that had coexisted peacefully for centuries with their Slavic neighbours. A population of whom very few heirs remain, a thousand-year-old tradition that deserves to be protected. In this sense, too, the cordial relationship that binds us to Slovenia finally ensures proper respect for the remaining Italian minorities in Slovenia, as well as for the Slovenian minorities in Italy, who – as we do not wish to deny – were also victims of persecution and harassment during the period of Fascist totalitarianism.
We have recalled the numbers of this tragedy, which – I repeat again – does not concern the combatants in a conflict that witnessed cruelty and brutality, but rather – in the vast majority of cases – defenceless and innocent civilians, many of whom had anti-fascist sentiments. Nevertheless, even if among the victims there had been a few isolated cases of people guilty of condemnable behaviour – and we would still be talking about a tiny minority – forms of summary justice and atrocious and cruel execution would not be acceptable.
Recalling the number of victims serves to understand the scale of the tragedy, but numbers are still an abstract definition. It is the stories, the human stories, which talk about the identity of the protagonists, that give us the most vivid and deepest sense of what happened. The stories of men and women, with their affections, their dreams, their hopes, their values.
After all, this is precisely what the criminals perpetrating acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing want to do in every part of the world and at every moment of history, e.g. to wipe away not only a people, but also the memory of people, of the single individuals who were part of it.
This is the reason why it is worth remembering at least some of the people who were victims of the foibe massacre. In past years, we dwelt on the stories of soldiers killed for no other reason than having done their duty and of priests who suffered martyrdom in the name of their religious beliefs and their belonging to the Italian community. Victims of ideology, of ethnic hatred, often also of private revenges disguised as political acts.
Today, I would like to recall the tragic fate of some women, wives, mothers, children, teachers and workers, in most cases victims of persecutory acts for alleged faults of their husbands and male relatives. Women who suffered the shame and deep wound of being raped before being victims of a brutal murder.
Perhaps the best known one, to which tribute is due also for all the others, is Norma Cossetto, a university student, innocent but proud to be Italian. She was horribly tortured and then murdered, not for her faults, but to punish her father’s adherence to fascism. However, the tragedy of that unfortunate girl, to whom President Ciampi awarded the Gold Medal for Civic Valour, is certainly not an isolated case.
She shared that tragic fate with the three Radecchi sisters, Fosca, Caterina and Albina, the latter in late-term pregnancy. The three girls, workers in a factory in Pula, after finishing their shifts, used to stop and talk with soldiers from a nearby barrack of the Royal Air Force.
For this fault alone they were abducted, repeatedly raped, and then thrown into the Terli foiba. Two of them were presumably still alive.
No less moving was the fate of Amalia Ardossi, 45, who, although not wanted by the partigiani, asked to follow her husband into captivity. The bodies of the two unfortunates were found in a foiba tied to each other.
What about Giuseppina and Alice Abbà, wife and daughter, respectively, of a traffic policeman killed in the foibe in 1943, and themselves murdered for having tried to have an enquiry opened into the death of their relative?
Probably the death in the foibe of Pietro Gonan, a merchant and well-known anti-fascist, can also be added to the sad list of violence against women. Years earlier, he had obtained the conviction of three criminals who had raped and murdered one of his underage daughters. Those same criminals, who were freed and joined the communist partigiani, thus took their revenge on the unfortunate father.
The list of these stories could continue for a long time, opening new pages of horror. There were 453 innocent women murdered in the foibe, several of them school teachers. The ferocity of Tito’s partigiani did not stop even before them.
Mister President of the Republic,
These painful stories speak for those who cannot speak: women, men, elderly people, children, torn from their homes, from their affections, from the warmth of home.
Remembering them is a duty towards long-forgotten victims, towards a tragedy played down in the past due to ideological bias. Remembering them, however, is above all a warning to the cruelty of war, to the madness of inter-ethnic hatred, to the danger of totalitarian ideologies under the banner of which, in the last century, the most heinous crimes in history were perpetrated, and in the name of which our homeland also experienced so much grief and suffering.
Despite the different magnitude, the memory of the foibe can be compared to that of the lagers and gulags, to remind our conscience every day of the duty to preserve peace, freedom, democracy, brotherhood between peoples, and the fruitful exchange between cultures. All this can never be taken for granted. It is a gift passed on to us, at least in Europe, in the West, by past generations. We have a duty to preserve it courageously and steadfastly in our own country and in every place in the world, from Ukraine to the Middle East, where these values are called into question by the cruelty of conflict.
Only in this way will we honour, as it deserves, the memory of these innocent compatriots of ours.
