Tuesday, February 13, 2007

"Foibe Massacre" Commemoration Creates Rift with Croatia

The ANNOTICO Report

 

Italy President Napolitano's speech on Saturday to Commemorate the Italian victims of the "Foibe" Massacres, caused Croatia's President Mesic to respond crisply, and create an angry exchange.

 

The "Foibe" marked the deaths of thousands of Italians who were pulled from their homes, tortured, shot and thrown into mountain crevasses by Communist Yugoslav partisans, AFTER Italy had abandoned the Nazis and joined the Allies, during and at the end of the war. Some victims were thrown - sometimes still alive - into Alpine crevasses known in local dialect as "foibe," and the atrocities became known as the foibe killings.

 

While reading the following Report, keep in mind the timeline: Italy did not join Germany as an Ally until June 1940. The allies invaded Sicily July 10, 1943, Mussolini was ousted July 25, 1943 by the Grand Council, who instructed Marshal Badoglio to begin secret negotiations with the Allies to end the fighting and to come over to the Allied side. That armistice was signed September 3, 1943. The Germans in Italy surrendered April 29 1945. 

 

Therefore these Massacres did not happen until AFTER Italy surrendered and in some cases TWO Years after Italy surrendered, and became an Ally Co Combatant.

 

Also the reference to "Brutal Italianization” was similar to the US "Assimilation" of Immigrants attitude, and the US "Don't speak the Language of the Enemy" Brain wash campaign.

 

The Italianization program encouraged Non Italian residents in areas with overwhelming Italian residents attend Italian language schools and churches and speak only the Italian language in PUBLIC. Even Italian Citizenship was offered to many who accepted.

 

This type of distortion is either stupidity or bigotry.

 

A particularly interesting aspect of this "disagreement" is that Both Napolitano and Mesic were/are Communists, and Communists were basically responsible for the Massacre, and that the Leadership of both Italy and Yugoslavia, (Croatia, was then part of Yugoslavia), after the war were Communists, so it was not advantageous for either side to make the massacre "public", and the story was therefore buried/ ignored.

 

 

Commemoration of WWII massacres by Yugoslav partisans sparks Italy-Croatia dispute


International Herald Tribune

The Associated Press

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

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Italy on Tuesday summoned Croatia's ambassador to the Foreign Ministry and canceled a government official's visit to Zagreb after angry exchanges over a weekend speech by Italy's president commemorating World War II massacres by Yugoslav partisans.

The dispute has revived grudges dating back six decades.

It began with President Giorgio Napolitano's speech on Saturday to mark the deaths of thousands of Italians who were pulled from their homes, tortured, shot and thrown into mountain crevasses by Communist Yugoslav partisans during and at the end of the war. Some victims were thrown  sometimes still alive  into Alpine crevasses known in local dialect as "foibe," and the atrocities became known as the foibe killings.

"There was a wave of hate and bloody fury, and a Slavic expansionist design ... that took on the sinister appearance of an ethnic cleansing," Napolitano said.

The response from Croatia, which was part of Yugoslavia until 1991, was chilly. President Stipe Mesic said Monday that Napolitano's speech contained "traces of open racism, historical revisionism and political revanchism."

Mesic said Tuesday that he would suggest that Italy and Croatia form a commission of forensics experts to investigate how many people died in the foibe operations.

"Then we can put an end to discussion about World War II," he said.

The comments prompted Italy's Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema to accuse Mesic of distorting the words of the president  both D'Alema and Napolitano are former Communists  and to summon the Croatian ambassador.

In their meeting, D'Alema told the ambassador he was "stunned and pained" by Mesic's words and insisted that there was no reason for the criticism of the Italian president's speech, according to ministry officials. They said that the envoy assured D'Alema he would relay Italy's sentiment to his country's authorities.

D'Alema canceled a visit to Croatia by Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Bobo Craxi, which had been scheduled for Wednesday.

Thousands of Italians were tortured and killed in Trieste, Gorizia and on the Istrian peninsula between 1943 and 1945 by Yugoslav Communists on anti-fascist rampages. The number is unclear, but some estimates put the figure at around 10,000.

Trieste, now part of Italy, and the Istrian peninsula  most of which is now in Croatia  came under Italian control after World War I and they were brutally "Italianized" under Benito Mussolini's fascists. Official Yugoslav postwar figures showed that about 80,000 Croats, Serbs and Montenegrins perished during the Italian occupation of Dalmatia and Montenegro in 1941-43.

Memories of that time prompted the revenge killings as World War II wound down and Yugoslavs entered the region. Many ordinary citizens were killed and tortured simply for being Italian or being hostile to annexation by Yugoslavia.

While not denying the killings, some Croatians condemn efforts that remember the victims without addressing the whole history.

"Crimes committed by Italian fascist soldiers remain fresh in the mind of living Croatian witnesses, who suffered in war camps, and it is obvious that the government could not stay silent," said political commentator Zeljko Trkanjec.

For decades, the foibe massacres did not appear in most of Italy's history books, and successive Italian governments were hesitant to raise the matter during the Cold War for fear of angering Yugoslavia, seen as a buffer between Western Europe and the Soviet Union.

In Italy, Communists, a powerful opposition force for decades, tried to bury the matter as an embarrassment. During the former, conservative government of Premier Silvio Berlusconi, Parliament approved a law in 2004 for a national day of memory.

Associated Press writer Eugene Brcic contributed to this story from Zagreb, Croatia.

 

The ANNOTICO Reports

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