Italy marks on Saturday the 20th anniversary of the massacre of thousands of Italians by Yugoslav resistance fighters in World War II. This massacre has been hidden for a long time, but it is a tragedy that has become a political game.
Since 2004, February 10 has been the so-called National Day of Remembrance for the Foibe Murder. In this murder, thousands of soldiers and civil servants working in then-fascist Italy were executed by Tito’s partisans and their bodies thrown into a sinkhole.
But Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right government has particularly welcomed the incident, announcing last week the creation of a museum dedicated to the victims.
The day is an opportunity to “honor the memory of those who died at the hands of the communists,” said Ignazio La Russa, president of the Senate and co-founder of Meloni’s post-fascist party Italian Brothers. he said.
Not everyone shares La Russa’s interpretation of La Russa, who infamously collected busts of the late fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. In reality, it was two killings and a subsequent mass flight of Italian speakers from what became Yugoslavia, then Slovenia and Croatia. .
The first massacre occurred in 1943, after Italy, an ally of Nazi Germany, signed an armistice with the United States and Britain.
Historian Eric Gobbetti said this was “the result of the violence committed by Italian fascists against Yugoslavia’s Slovenian and Croat minorities, who took revenge after Italy’s surrender.”
Gobbetti, author of a book on Foibe, told AFP that the retaliation was “not against all Italians, but against some Italians who represent the fascist state.”
He said the second massacre in 1945, after the end of the war, was more like a “reckoning” between the Yugoslav army that had liberated the territory and the soldiers who had fought alongside the Nazis, as had also happened in France.
“The victims were essentially German collaborators, civilians but above all military personnel,” Gobbetti said.
Although the prevailing theory in Italy is that Italians were entirely innocent victims, Gobbetti and other historians emphasize how the fascist regime mistreated the region’s minorities.
– “Climate of violence” –
Experts also dispute how many people died in Foibe, named after the Italian word for the sinkhole into which the victims were thrown, and sometimes how many were even alive.
Mr Gobbetti said “up to 5,000 people” were killed, but the Italian group Federesli, which represents exiles at the time, claims between 6,000 and 10,000 were killed.
Similar discrepancies exist in estimates of the number of people displaced after postwar border changes, in which Italy lost territory gained in World War I.
For historians, about 250,000 people were expelled, while for Federesli it was 350,000.
Lorenzo Salimbeni, Mr Federesli’s spokesman, said that “due to the climate of violence imposed by Tito’s communist regime, around 90% of the Italian-born community has left” and is living in refugee camps set up by Italy. Ta.
– Fascism Nostalgia –
Why are there different views?
“Politicians nostalgic for fascism have always used this story to make themselves appear to be victims of World War II rather than executioners, when in reality Italian fascists “He helped start the war,” Gobbetti said.
The story was included in the 2004 law establishing a national day, passed under Silvio Berlusconi’s government but supported by the opposition, and received media coverage.
In this context, “anyone who remembers the actual historical facts is considered to be denying Phoebe,” although some arguments place the genocide on the same level as the Holocaust. Gobbetti said.
Salimbeni, from the Exile Association, welcomed the news of a new museum in Foibe, saying it follows the efforts of previous governments “of the left and the right.”
However, this reinterpretation of history in Italy has provoked the anger of neighboring countries.
In 2019, Slovenia accused Rome of “unprecedented historical revisionism” over the genocide.
The comment came after then Interior Minister Matteo Salvini (now deputy prime minister in Meloni’s government) compared the children who died at Feube to those who died at Auschwitz.
“Fascism is a fact and its aim was to destroy the Slovenian people,” said then-Slovenian Prime Minister Marjan Sarek.
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