Today is the day of remembrance for the victims of the Foibe, then let's talk about the victims of the sinkholes. But let's talk about it in historical terms and without making propaganda.
When we talk about the Foibe, the first thing we say is that they were killed because "guilty of being Italian".
The truth is slightly more complicated than that and the story that the victims of the sinkholes were victims of some hatred towards Italians / Italian speakers, is actually the result of propaganda.
The real "fault" of the victims of the sinkholes (and with this I absolutely do not want to justify the foibisti, indeed, I condemn their crimes, no less disgusting than those of fascism and the third reich) was not that of "being Italian or Italian-speaking" because among the Foibisti, in reality, there were many people who spoke Italian, and who were much closer to the Italic culture and traditions than to those of the Balkan area.
Their fault was that they refused to leave the lands they had occupied a few years earlier, their fault was that of having gone there as fascists and having raped women and brutally murdered anyone who opposed them, they were guilty of having hunted the locals from their lands and their homes and to have taken possession of those lands and houses.
However, it must also be said that not all "Italians" or to be more precise, all non-Slavs in the region fell into this profile, there were also many people who had gone there as seasonal workers and who had remained there, peacefully, and who had lived peacefully with the locals, but unfortunately, during the "nationalist" waves when it comes to tracing a borderline between "us and them" anyone who is not "us" automatically becomes the bearer of all the crimes committed by others, and consequently many innocent Italians were treated as criminals and were banned, hunted and forced to to go away, to leave those lands forever, in one way or another.
Some, understanding the situation, fled, and the first to flee were precisely those with a guilty conscience, those who felt directly threatened, many others, having done nothing wrong, decided to stay, and in staying, they went against the inhuman retaliation. and disproportionate to the Foibisti and were treated, as the Italians had treated those who had refused to swear allegiance to Fascism.
They were arrested, taken to the mountains, murdered and thrown into the Foibe.
What happened was disgusting and inhumane, and it was both before and during and after the war, it was disgusting and inhumane the behavior of the Italians before and during the war, towards the locals, as it was that of the local people, after the war, towards the Italians, and personally I find it equally disgusting to pretend that the fault lies only with one or the other side, without considering the historical context and all that was behind it and that between 1919 (from the river occupation) and 1945 had contributed to fueling tension and intolerance in the region.
The victims of the sinkholes are first of all victims of blind and brutal Nationalism, they are victims of generalization, of the inability to distinguish the real culprit, from someone who was there by chance, and it is quite surreal, that today, it is precisely the nationalists and sovereignists to point the finger at the crimes of nationalism and the sovereignty of Tito's Yugoslavia.
Another thing must also be said, in 1948 the Italian government, in agreement with the Yugoslav government, chose to put a stone on this matter, to go further.
After the war Italy had many problems, and risked losing control of some "border" cities and regions due to a dispute over liberation, with Yugoslavia, and there were also mutual accusations between Italy and Yugoslavia of having committed heinous crimes during the war period.
Seventy years later, what happened must absolutely be remembered, but it must be remembered in a historical way, as events that have now been concluded for over seventy years. The historical memory of the massacres, the massacres, the ethnic cleansing, both in the Fascist era and in the Tito regime, must not be continued, the political, politicized and propaganda narrative should not be continued.
Also because, to say it all, it was the right-wing current of the DC and subsequently the MSI that pushed for the filing of war crimes files, while the PCI took shape in the political scene of the fifties, as the only Italian party openly condemned the war crimes of Yugoslavia and that on several occasions, constantly until 1954 and occasionally until the early sixties, publicly asked for the reopening of the files, but his voice remained unheard until it vanished completely .