Initially this article was entitled "Foibe:the responsibility of the Italians in the massacres", it was a highly provocative title and as explained in the introduction, it is obvious that the victims have no responsibility in the massacre. The victims of the sinkholes paid for the crimes of their fathers and grandfathers, and this, according to my code of justice, is perhaps even more serious.
My intent with this article is not to express a moral judgment on the incident nor to bend it to mere political propaganda, my intent is purely historical and the subject of the article, if you call into question the massacres of the Foibe are not the sinkholes, but the Italian occupation of Istria in the 1920s and 1930s.
In my opinion, this is a fundamental issue for understanding what happened after World War II, above all because on the question of Foibe we often hear phrases like this " The Italians were mercilessly massacred by Tito's Communists, for the sole fault of being Italians . "
Then follows a post probably “ very unpopular “, But unfortunately the historical reality is a little more complicated than simple political propaganda and some events are not always totally black or white. In some cases, and the slaughters of the sinkholes are one of these cases, it may happen that both parties involved have their own (more or less large) amount of responsibility.
I make a final premise, I have already explained extensively in another article why in 1948 the Italian government finally decided not to prosecute the Yugoslav criminals, in this article I will limit myself to saying that the crimes of Italy and the Italians were far more numerous and diluted in a longer time than those committed by the Yugoslav partisans and consequently, insisting on the punishment of the Yugoslav crimes by the Italian government, would have cost Italy and its new role in the international community, a price that it could not afford. to pay. That said.
It is true, in Yugoslavia a terrible crime was committed against the Italians who were there , this is undeniable and even if in this post I will go to explain who those Italians actually were, why they were there and why they were massacred, I do not want to legitimize what happened in any way, what happened is a crime and remains a crime , there are no extenuating circumstances, but common responsibilities cannot be ignored. In this specific case we are dealing with a crime committed as a response to decades of crimes and abuses, but the fact that the sinkholes are a response to other crimes does not make them a less serious crime, but let's go in order.
Let's start by saying that the region of Istria is not a historical Italian region, historically, and by historically I mean in the last thousands of years, it has always been inhabited by populations of Slavic origin. For many centuries these territories were under the control of the Holy Roman Empire first, the Austrian Empire and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when in the 19th century the Habsburg Empire changed its name.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, when national unity was proclaimed in Italy and the wars of independence were fought, the then inhabitants of Istria, as well as those of Dalmatia, did not care much about it, they did not rise up against the Habsburg to join the new nation led by the Savoy and this because they did not feel part of the Italian tradition and culture, a separate discussion must be made for the city of Trieste whose population was mostly of "Venetian" origin, not to say Venetians, but a single city in an entire region is not enough to define the regional identity.
The period of the wars of independence ended and the unification of Italy was officially completed in 1871 (when the papal state was also annexed) or if you prefer 1861, in Istria there were no anti-Habsburg uprisings or claims of belonging to Italy, because the inhabitants of those regions did not consider themselves Italians, as mentioned above, a separate discussion must be made for the city of Trieste where actually some "Italians" were there, and took to the streets, but they were still 4 cats, too few to mobilize an entire city, let alone an entire region.
Years pass, more than half a century goes by, the First World War begins, the central empires are collapsing and the European political leaders are aware of it, they are aware that the imminent disintegration of the central empires will cause a power vacuum in large areas of ' Europe and North Africa and not surprisingly try to take advantage of the void to claim control over new territories, basically to expand and increase their empires and Italy is no exception. we recall that Italy, among the many reasons why it enters the war , declares a not at all veiled desire to expand its territories and in this she is encouraged by the speeches of Cesare Battisti (not to be confused with the terrorist Cesare Battisti of the years of lead) , Trieste socialist deputy in the Vienna parliament.
Italy wants to go to war and expand its possessions and the only possible opponent close and weak enough to fight against is the Austro-Hungarian empire and as we know, Italy manages to reach an agreement with France and the United Kingdom to be able to conquer Austrian territories , de facto the war of the Italians is a war, bankruptcy of conquest, which has as its ultimate goal the conquest of new territories, including Istria and Dalmatia.
The choice of Italy falls on Istria and Dalmatia (and possibly other territories of the Adriatic coast of the Balkans) for political and strategic reasons, mainly because “they are within reach of a bath” , in the sense that the Italian fleet was not exactly one of the best in the Mediterranean, but the Adriatic was not a demanding sea and the Hapsburg fleet did not pose a real threat.
The war ends with a military defeat of Italy because being a war of conquest, if you find yourself having less territories than you had when you started the war, it is a defeat, but the allies still grant it some territory to Italy, mainly to reward the war effort, but this is not enough for Italy and expects much more than what it has been granted (and I want to clarify that, in my opinion it has been granted too much).
We are not going around it, after the war Istria and Dalmatia are occupied "illegally" by numerous Italian migrants, tacitly supported by the government, mostly they are people who know those lands, with the exception of some isolated cases (such as D "Annunzio). some were seasonal migrants who even before unification periodically went to the Austro-Hungarian territories to work mainly as workers, in mines and quarries. In short, the Italians had been habitual frequenters / workers of the region for more than a century and between the first and second world wars, many seasonal migrants decided to settle there regularly, in short, they went there and never returned to Italy. Many remained there for various reasons, partly because they believed that those lands were theirs by right, partly because those lands once belonged to the Habsburg crown, but after the war the crown had fallen and basically for the control of the lands it was in force. the law of the strongest, "the land belongs to those who take it" and the Italians took it without too many compliments .
At this stage the clashes between locals and Italians are very limited, because the small local landowners (who for better or worse had done the same thing as the Italians) had known Italians for generations and had worked together for generations and in short, everyone took the piece of land where he worked before the war or where his ancestors worked.
The problems began in the mid-twenties, with the fascist turn in Italy, and even more so with the rise of Nazism in Germany, in the thirties.
The advent of racial ideologies resulted in a total reclamation of those territories, now the land occupation is total but the Italians continue to arrive in Istria and the fascist government assigns them lands that until then had been occupied by the locals , in short, in a no-man's land the fascist government decides that certain lands must belong to the Italians and therefore, the non-Italians who lived there, are driven out of their homes and lands basically by force, and this is the first of a series of steps that for over twenty years would have fed resentment towards the Italians and would have exploded after World War II with the massacres of Foibe.
During the war, Italy is known to conduct a expansion campaign in the Balkan area , running into numerous fools and often resorting to German support, and at a certain point the Slavic peoples, taking advantage of the little control of the Italians over the territory, manage to organize themselves into partisan groups and manage to take control of many territories, it must be said, to avoiding misunderstandings that, after the armistice of 43, many Italian soldiers will join the Yugoslav partisans in the war against the Germans.
After the war, after the Nazi-fascist occupation, there is a political problem linked to the administration of some territories, including the city of Trieste itself, which on the one hand were "freed" from the Nazi occupation by the Yugoslav militias, by the other, they are mainly inhabited by Italians who occupied those territories over the previous twenty years and therefore a question arises, should those territories be considered as Italians or Yugoslavs?
For the militias of Yugoslav partisans who exercised direct control of the territory, the answer is simple, those territories were liberated by the partisans and are now under the control and authority of the liberators who would later merge into the government of Tito, those who live in those regions can choose whether to stay there and "swear allegiance" to the new state or return to the land of their fathers, freely or by force. The Italians, descendants of those same Italians who had occupied those lands a few decades earlier, considered that land their own land, they do not want to leave their home (just as the Istrians did not want to leave it when the Italians chased them away), they do not want to leave and at the same time they want to continue living in Italy, in short, they want those territories to remain (or at least become) Italians because Italians have been living there for a few generations.
The situation is very delicate as well as problematic and is badly managed by the nascent Yugoslav government that we remember, it has not yet consolidated, in fact many regions are still controlled by the militias that freed them and these militias do not want to give up those lands they freed fighting hard against a stronger and better organized enemy, they decide to "go to the dark side" and use force to drive out foreign invaders , I don't use these words at random, committing massacres and crimes that are sadly known to us all.
The international response to the Istrian crisis and in particular for the management of the Triestine question is a sort of international commissioner, let's call it, of the city of Trieste, the only "Italian" city in the region. Trieste is in fact placed under international control , similarly to what had happened to Germany and Korea, and would definitely return under the control of the Italian government only in 1971 , almost 20 years after the end of the Second World War, when the Italian government formally committed to the United Nations to definitively and permanently renounce any territorial claim on Istria, Dalmatia and other territories on the Adriatic coast of the Balkans.
In conclusion, I repeat, with the story of these events they absolutely do not want to decriminalize the crimes committed by the Yugoslav partisan commanders, many of whom, subsequently, would have assumed key positions in Tito's government, I have already spoken extensively, in another article and in a video of the political and historical reasons why in 1948 it was decided to close the issue of war crimes committed by the Italians and against the Italians in what would become the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. My intent, with this article, and I hope I succeeded , is to show that the Italians massacred in the Foibe massacres were not only "guilty of being Italian" , their history in Istria was short and characterized by a deep rivalry with local peoples, rivalries that for decades had covered violent abuses perpetuated by the Italians against the Slavic populations and the memory of these abuses was the starting point of the crimes committed in Yugoslavia on both sides.
In Istria thousands of Italians were massacred for the crimes committed by their fathers or by other Italians, their only fault is not that of being Italian, but of not having become aware of the reality in which they lived and of having claimed, perhaps too soon and with too much force, to take control of a territory that did not belong to them and in which they were an unwelcome and perhaps never desired minority.
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