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".
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