Speech by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Antonio Tajani
Mr President of the Republic,
Authorities,
Ladies and gentlemen,
The Day of Remembrance, established by the Berlusconi government in 2004, confronts us with a tragic page in our national history. A page marked by the martyrdom of many innocent people, but also by the forced exodus from their homes and lands of hundreds of thousands of human beings whose only crime was being Italian.
Today is a day dedicated to the memory of these broken lives and traumatic events: memory, I want to emphasise this term, which means recollection, homage to the memory, reflection on a past that cannot be forgotten so that it never happens again.
‘Remembering’ therefore means neither recrimination nor revenge. Our neighbours to the east, the countries born out of the dissolution of the Yugoslav state, clearly bear no responsibility for what happened.
On the contrary, Slovenia and Croatia 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 Italy’s policy of paying special attention to the Balkans, hoping that the countries in that area that are not yet members will join the European Union and the Atlantic Alliance.
Today, I will host a meeting at Villa Madama of the Foreign Ministers of the Group of Friends of the Balkans, which we helped to create precisely to accompany the countries of the region on their path to reunification with the European family.
In this initial phase of the new European institutional cycle, we strongly wanted a significant presence of European institutions precisely to confirm this message of fraternal embrace to the region. I am personally delighted that High Representative Kallas and Enlargement Commissioner Kos immediately accepted my invitation with enthusiasm.
Moreover, the historic handshake with Slovenian President Pahor, whom you, Mr President of the Republic, chose to meet at the Basovizza foiba, a place that symbolises that great tragedy, solemnly confirmed the renewed brotherhood between the two peoples.
Ideological fanaticism and the brutality of war had torn apart the unity of a territory in which Italian, Slavic and Germanic populations had coexisted peacefully and prospered for many centuries.
This makes us reflect on the gravity of a reckless act that offends the memory of the victims. I am referring, of course, to the act of a single provocateur who, in recent days, desecrated the site of the Basovizza foiba, an act that not only insults the fallen but reopens painful wounds in the living.
For this reason, I wish to reiterate my strongest condemnation of this intolerable and unjustifiable act.
Fortunately, this was an isolated incident because, I want to reiterate, the spirit that characterises relations not only between states but also between peoples is, thankfully, profoundly different. It is a spirit that can be found in the emotion and excitement with which we can cross Piazza della Transalpina in Gorizia, long a symbol of division and now, on the contrary, a symbol of openness and unity. Where once ran the barbed wire of one of the most heavily guarded and divisive borders in Europe, 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 pays fitting tribute to a place of great cultural prestige.
Your presence, Mr President, at the opening ceremony alongside Slovenian President Musar, pays the highest tribute to this very important initiative.
Mr President,
the estimated number of victims of the Foibe tragedy is over four thousand, while the number of Giuliano-Dalmatian refugees exiled from their lands, from the lands of their fathers, is over three hundred and fifty thousand.
These are the numbers of ethnic cleansing, perpetrated in the name of two aberrations typical of the 20th century: extreme nationalism and communism.
Ethnic cleansing because the victims were innocent, or guilty only of having an Italian surname, of speaking Italian, of feeling Italian. A hard-working civilian population that had lived peacefully for centuries with their Slavic neighbours. A population of which very few descendants remain, a thousand-year-old tradition that deserves to be protected. In this sense too, the cordial relationship that binds us to Slovenia finally guarantees due respect for the remaining Italian minorities in Slovenia, as well as for the Slovenian minorities in Italy, who, we do not deny, were also victims of persecution and oppression during the period of totalitarianism.
We have recalled the numbers involved in this tragedy, which, I would like to reiterate, did not involve combatants in a conflict marked by cruelty and brutality, but rather – in the vast majority of cases – defenceless and innocent civilians, many of whom were anti-fascists.
Remembering the number of victims helps us to understand the scale of the tragedy, but numbers are still an abstract definition. It is the stories, the human events that restore the identity of the protagonists, that give us the most vivid and profound sense of what happened. The stories of women and men, with their affections, their dreams, their hopes, their values.
Today, I would like to remember the tragic fate of some women, wives, mothers, children, teachers, workers, in most cases victims of persecution for the alleged crimes of their male relatives. Women who suffered the shame and deep wound of the violation of their privacy even before being victims of brutal murder.
Perhaps the best-known name, honoured on behalf of all the others, is that of Norma Cossetto, a university student, innocent of everything but proud to be Italian. She was horribly tortured and then killed, not for her own crimes but to punish her father’s adherence to fascism. But the tragedy of that unfortunate girl, whom President Ciampi wanted to award the Gold Medal for Civil Valour, is certainly not an isolated case.
Her tragic fate is shared, for example, by the three Radecchi sisters, Fosca, Caterina and Albina, the latter being heavily pregnant. The three girls, who worked in a factory in Pola, used to stay behind after their shift to chat with soldiers from a nearby Royal Air Force barracks.
For this alone, they were kidnapped, repeatedly abused, and then thrown into the Terli foiba. Two of them are presumed to still be alive.
No less moving is the fate of Amalia Ardossi, 45, who, although not wanted by the partisans, asked to follow her husband into captivity. The bodies of the two unfortunate souls were found in a foiba, tied together.
And what about Giuseppina and Alice Abbà, respectively the wife and daughter of a traffic policeman killed in the foibe in 1943, who were themselves murdered for trying to open an investigation into the death of their relative?
Perhaps the death in a foiba of Pietro Gonan, a merchant and well-known anti-fascist, can also be added to the sad chapter of violence against women. Years earlier, he had secured the conviction of three criminals who had raped and killed his underage daughter. These same criminals, freed and having joined the communist partisans, thus took their revenge on the unfortunate father.
These stories could go on and on, revealing new pages of horror. A total of 453 innocent women were murdered in the foibe, many of whom were teachers. The ferocity of Tito’s partisans did not even spare them.
Mr President of the Republic,
these painful stories speak for those who cannot speak: women, men, elderly people and children torn from their homes, their loved ones and the warmth of their family hearths.
Remembering them is a duty we owe to victims who have long been forgotten, to a tragedy that was minimised in the past due to ideological prejudice. But above all, their memory is a warning against the cruelty of war, against the madness of inter-ethnic hatred, against the danger of totalitarian ideologies in the name of which, in the last century, the most heinous crimes in history were committed, and in the name of which our country also suffered so much grief and suffering.
The memory of the foibe can be compared, despite the different numbers, to that of the concentration camps and gulags, to remind our consciences every day of our duty to preserve peace, freedom, democracy, brotherhood among peoples, and fruitful exchange between cultures. All this can never be taken for granted. It is a gift that past generations have given us, at least in Europe, in the West, and we have a duty to preserve it with courage and determination in our country and in every part of the world, from Ukraine to the Middle East, where these values are challenged by the cruelty of conflict.
Only in this way will we honour the memory of these innocent compatriots of ours as they deserve.
