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Foibe massacres

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Location of some foibe where (alleged) mass killings took place

Foibe massacres were mass killings attributed to Yugoslav partisans during and shortly after World War II against Italians. The name derives from the local geological feature, foiba (a type of deep karst sinkhole). This term indicates, by extension, the killings involving also other formations, such as Basovizza's "foiba", which is actually a minerary pit.

Some Italian political forces, especially the neo-fascist right-wing but also the post-fascist National Alliance, claim this was an "holocaust" of innocent civilians; others, which accuse this pretention to amount to revisionism, point out that the number of victims was smaller than alleged, and mostly restricted to fascists, both military and civilians, who might have had committed war crimes during World War II in Yugoslavia.

Events

Foibe are often referred to in the context of mass killings in which the majority of victims were ethnic Italians. Such mass killings were committed after the capitulation of Italy on September 8, 1943 and in 1945, when Yugoslav partisans under Tito's command entered Istria and parts of Venezia Giulia, and recaptured the Slovene ethnic territory. The Yugoslav army (IX Corpus) met with the British forces on the river Soča/Isonzo on May 3, 1945, so that the city of Trieste and the surroundings came, not without controversy, under Yugoslav military administration.

The number of victims is still unknown, difficult to establish and matter of much controversy. Estimates range from as low as 2,000 to as high as 20,000. According to data gathered by a mixed Slovene-Italian historical commission established in 1993, the number of people missing from the region (believed to have been thrown in the foibe), range from 1,300 to 1,600, but this estimate does not include those killed in current Croatian territory. Some prominent historians like Raoul Pupo or Roberto Spazzali estimated the total number of victims at about 5,000. Most of them were court-martialed fascists or enemy soldiers, but civilians were also killed. Actual body-count may be different, as no reliable records exist of executed German soldiers and participants of various Quisling formations.

The killings of 1943 were mostly spontaneous and were a reaction to the Italian pre-war and war crimes, such as concentration camps (among them the Rab and Gonars camps), political repression, forceful italianization and nationalistic repression of Slavs exercised by Italian fascist regime in the previous decades.

The episodes of 1945 occurred partly under conditions of guerrilla fighting of Slovenian, Croatian and Italian partisans with the Germans, the Italian Social Republic's forces and their Slavic collaborators, and partially after the occupation of the territory by the army formations of Yugoslavia. Killings may have included war crimes as well as civilian crimes of private or political retaliation. The main motive of the mass killings seems to be a plan of "political cleansing", that is to say, elimination of potential enemies of the communist Yugoslav rule, including members of German and Italian fascist units, Italian officials, Italian, Slovenian and Croatian anti-communists and that part of the Italian elites that supported non-fascist and non-communist Italy.

Some Italian sources claim that ethnic cleansing was another motive, but many historians disagree with that statement. However, a big part of the Slavic population had a very negative attitude towards Italians stereotyped as Fascist oppressors (and a big part of the Italian population had a very negative attitude towards Slavs stereotyped as barbarian communists), so ethnic tensions could have played some role as far as individual motivations are concerned.

Quote from the report of the mixed Italian-Slovenian commission succinctly describes the circumstances of the 1945 killings:

"14. These events were triggered by the atmosphere of settling accounts with the fascist violence; but, as it seems, they mostly proceeded from a preliminary plan which included several tendencies: endeavours to remove persons and structures who were in one way or another (regardless of their personal responsibility) linked with Fascism, with the Nazi supremacy, with collaboration and with the Italian state, and endeavours to carry out preventive cleansing of real, potential or only alleged opponents of the communist regime, and the annexation of Venezia Giulia to the new Yugoslavia. The initial impulse was instigated by the revolutionary movement which was changed into a political regime, and transformed the charge of national and ideological intolerance between the partisans into violence at the national level."

Investigations of the Foibe

The first claims of people being thrown into foibe date back to 1943, when the Wehrmacht took back the area from the partisans. Obviously, these first claims have since come under much scepticism, since they were likely to be at least exaggerated by Nazi Germany for propaganda purposes.

No investigation of the crimes had been initiated either by Italy, Yugoslavia or any international bodies in the post-war period, until after Slovenia became an independent country in 1991.

Italian-Slovene relations in the relevant period (1880s to 1950s) have been under intensive study by historians since 1990. A joint report by a commission of historians from both countries was published under the auspices of the two governments in the year 2000. The report puts the Italian-Slovenian relations in a wider context, and touches the question of mass killings associated with the foibe. As no exact count was ascertained, the report includes a wording of "hundreds of victims," referring to the territory relevant for Italo-Slovenian relations, and thus excluding the Croatian territories.

In march 2006, the border municipality of Nova Gorica in Slovenia finally released documents regarding 150 citizens of Gorizia (the twin town on the italian part of the border) disapperead in 1945 after being deported by Tito's partizan of the IX corpus. The relatives were requesting informations to the Yuoglacian and then Slovenian authorities for years. Those 150 are supposed to be a tiny part of those who died in the region. The documents support the thesis of the involvement of ufficial yugoslav state.

Current Influence in Politics

The Foibe have been a long-neglected subject in mainstream political debate, only recently garnering broader attention with the recent publication of several scholarly books and historical studies. It is thought that after WW2, politicos wanted to direct the country's attention toward the future and away from fascist crimes, subsuming the issue of the Foibe within this mass "forgetting".

Another reason for the neglect of the Foibe can be found in the high degree of ideology historically present in the public debate in Italy. The presence of the biggest Communist party in Western Europe made it difficult to look at recent history objectively. Many Istrians hid their origins for fear of being identified by Italian Communists, who tended to believe that all Italian Istrians had cooperated with the Fascists. Moreover, because of the Cold War and the desire to maintain good relations with Tito, the Yugoslav Massacres were a dangerous topic to broach. In addition to the Foibe, many other massacres committed by Italian Partisans in the Resistance movement have remained unacknowledged and undiscussed for many years.

Since the end of the Cold War, and more recently under the Presidency of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the historical debate has begun to take on a less ideological tone. The coalition of Silvio Berlusconi brought the issue back into open discussion: the Italian Parliament (with the support of the vast majority of parliament) made February 10 National Memorial Day of the Exiles and Foibe, first celebrated in 2005 with exhibitions and observances throughout Italy (especially in Trieste). The occasion is a remembrance of innocents killed and forced to leave their homes, with little support from their home country. In Ciampi's words: "It is the time that reasoned remembraces take the place of exasperated rancours". Moreover, for the first time, leaders from the left,such as Walter Veltroni, visited the Foiba of Basovizza and admitted the culpability of the Italian Left in covering up the subject for decades.

However, the conciliatory moves of Ciampi and Veltroni were not supported by all Italian politicians. Members of the National Alliance party (post-fascist right) especially exploited the situation to promote a nationalist agenda, some even claiming the revision of treaties with former Yugoslav countries.

For the Foibe memorial day, an RAI TV movie production, Il Cuore nel Pozzo (The Heart in the Pit) [1]. was broadcast on prime time. The movie was seen by 17 million people on its first broadcast in Italy. Whether a neutral point of view is captured is dubious, as the concept of Italian fascism and its association with the German Nazism and their crimes in the region are only vaguely mentioned in this war drama. Many (especially Slovenian politicians and some in the left wing of Italian politics) accused the movie of being tantamount to propaganda, presenting Italians as innocent victims and not as the former allies of Nazi Germany. The Italian soldiers were presented as merciful and altruistic, whereas Tito's partisans were presented as ruthless assassins and rapists, the main character among them fixated on taking back the son he had had from an Italian woman he had raped years before.

The director claims to have been completely free of political influences in the making of the film. His supporters claim that in the movie, previous fascist crimes are vaguely recalled but not explained in detail in order to avoid appearing to promote the idea that one crime justifies another. They point out that both good and bad Italian characters are portrayed in the film, as well as both good and bad Slavs.

Bibliography

Many books have been written about the foibe, and results, intepretations and estimates of victims can in some cases vary largely according to the point of view of the author. Since many of the alleged foibe lie outside Italian territory, no formal and complete investigation could be carried out during the years of the Cold war, and books could be of a speculative or anecdotal nature. Since the topic was especially interesting for the extreme right, there is an overrepresentation of authors that can be traced to neo-fascism. Conversely, some authors from the left wing of politics have maintained that the foibe were either an exaggeration (or even an invention) of the extreme right for propaganda purposes, often noting that fascist and nazi crimes in the same areas dwarf the foibe allegations. Since a definitive investigation on all foibe has not yet been carried out, and is unlikely to be carried out anytime in the near future due to technical and political difficulties, the subject is still controversial, and one should approach any book in this bibliography with a critical spirit.

  • Gianni Bartoli, Il martirologio delle genti adriatiche
Gianni Bartoli was the former mayor of Trieste, with the centrist Christian Democracy.
  • Claudia Cernigoi, Operazione Foibe—Tra storia e mito, Kappa Vu, Udine, 2005, ISBN X001486360. Available online.
Claudia Cernigoi is apparently a former member of the Communist Refoundation Party.
Kappa Vu is a small left-wing publishing house.
  • Vincenzo Maria De Luca, Foibe. Una tragedia annunciata. Il lungo addio italiano alla Venezia Giulia, Settimo sigillo, Roma, 2000.
Settimo Sigillo is a small publishing house, specialised in revisionist books.
  • Gianni Oliva, Foibe, Oscar Mondadori, 2003, ISBN 8804515848.
  • Luigi Papo, L'Istria e le sue foibe, Settimo sigillo, Roma, 1999.
  • Luigi Papo, L'ultima bandiera.
Luigi Papo has been accused of being a war criminal in Istria during World War II.
  • Marco Pirina, Dalle foibe all'esodo 1943-1956.
Pirina has been associated to the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, the FUAN, and Fronte Delta, an extreme-right university movement.
  • Raoul Pupo, Il lungo esodo. Istria: le persecuzioni, le foibe, l'esilio, Rizzoli, 2005, ISBN 8817005622.
  • Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali, Foibe, Mondadori, 2003, ISBN 978884249015.
Raoul Pupo is an associate professor in contemporary history at the University of Trieste.
  • Franco Razzi, Lager e foibe in Slovenia.
  • Guido Rumici, Infoibati, Mursia, Milano, 2002, ISBN 8842529990.
  • Giorgio Rustia, Contro operazione foibe a Trieste, 2000.
Rustia is apparently close to Forza Nuova, a neofascist movement.
  • Carlo Sgorlon, La foiba grande, Mondadori, 2005, ISBN 8804380020.
  • Pol Vice, Scampati o no - i racconti di chi uscì "vivo" dalla foiba, Kappa Vu, Udine, 2005.

See also

Report of the Italian-Slovene commission of historians (in three languages)

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