Premier Giorgia Meloni blasted
decades of "unforgivable" silence about the Foibe on Saturday as
she took part in a ceremony on the national day of memory of the
mass killings by Tito's Yugoslav Partisans of Italians living in
the area that stretches from the Trieste zone in Italy's Friuli
Venezia Giulia region across the Istrian peninsula to Dalmatia
in Croatia during and immediately after WWII. Foibe are natural
pit-like karst sinkholes typically found in Friuli Venezia
Giulia and the Slovenian part of Istria into which victims were
thrown, sometimes alive. It is estimated that as many as 15,000
Italians largely, but not always, identified with Fascism were
tortured or killed by Yugoslav communists who occupied the
Istrian peninsula during the last two years of the war. Many of
the victims were thrown into the narrow mountain gorges during
anti-Fascist uprisings in the area and the exact number of
victims of these atrocities is unknown, in part because Tito's
forces destroyed local population records to cover up their
crimes. Many Italians were forced to flee their homes because of
the massacres. Italy established Foibe Remembrance Day only in
2004, as the tragedy had been swept under the carpet by
anti-Fascists in the postwar years. Remembrance of the Foibe
massacres has found new impetus under the Meloni's right-centre
government, which at the end of January approved the creation of
a dedicated museum on the proposal of the premier herself and
Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano. "I came here many times,
as a girl, at a time when, if you did so, you were pointed at,
accused, isolated," Meloni said at the Basovizza National
Monument for the victims of the Foibe, near Trieste. "And I came
back as an adult to finally celebrate the day of remembrance
that swept away, once and for all, the unforgivable conspiracy
of silence that had shrouded the tragedy of the Foibe for
decades and kept the drama of the exodus in the oblivion of
indifference. "We are here to ask again for forgiveness on
behalf of the institutions of this Republic for the guilty
silence that has shrouded the events of our eastern border for
decades and to pay homage to all the Istrians, the
Giuliano-Dalmatians who, in order to remain Italian, decided to
leave everything, houses, property, land, to remain with the
only thing that the Tito Communists could not take away from
them, and that is their identity".
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