A submerged minority     As Slovene Italian writer Pavel Stranj calls it .     Under the first relatively objective census of the area covered by the present province of Trieste in 1911, Slovenes formed 30% of the rapidly growing numbers of Trieste city dwellers and 95% of its rural population. But by 1985 the Slovene population of Trieste Province was no more than 49,000 out of 250,000, now generally in decline and rapidly aging, according to the Slovene Research Institute of Trieste (SLORI). There was a total Slovene population in Italy in 1985 of 100,000.     Slovene is the Westernmost language of the South Slav languages, which also include Bulgarian and Serbo-Croat. It has unique features such as a dual number as well as singular and plurals, and is spoken by over two million people, made up of the 1,900,000 citizens of independent Slovenia, its considerable minorities in Austria and Italy and smaller numbers in Hungary.     But why should Slovene survive in Trieste and along the Italian frontier in this day and age, when minority tongues all round the world are tumbling before the media onslaught of the major languages?     After all, the 100,000 strong Slovene minority in Italy is not the only minority in Europe. There are over a dozen whose situation reaches the desperate. And it is not the only Slovene minority outside the independent state of Slovenia, nor the worst served. In some ways the 50,000 Slovenes living in Austria are even more crushed, not to mention the almost entirely neglected community of Slovenes living just across the border from Slovenia in Hungary. Nor is it the only substantial non-Italian minority in Italy. There are the 400,000 Germans of the Alto Adige (or more accurately the South Tyrol) and the 50,000 French in the Val d'Aosta, not to mention the plethora of tiny groups from Greeks to Catalans scattered across the South of Italy, Sicily and Sardinia. Everywhere in Italy the laws to protect minorities are more honoured in the breach than the observance. But none more blatantly than towards the Slovene minority along the borders of Italy. At various times, both the South Tyrolers and the Slovenes have been alleged to be "the most protected minorities in Europe. After all, Italian laws on the protection of minorities are the most progressive in Europe." Quite, quite. As a Triestino Slovene friend told me, successive Italian governments have practised the time honoured concept of "prima si fa la legge, poi si trova l'inganno" [ first pass the law and then find a loophole] in relation to Slovene.     In the province of Trieste, recent Italian efforts to assimilate the Slovenes have fired a hatred radically different from the widespread Italian attitude of campanilismo. This hatred has led to the loss of thousands of lives since the end of the First World War when Italy first marched into Trieste. As spoils of war in 1918, along with the 100,000 or so Italians in Trieste, Italy acquired 300,000 to 500,000 Slovenes and Croats as very unwilling subjects, mainly those inhabiting the ethnically mixed Istrian peninsula and patches of Dalmatia but also the nationally almost purely Slovene western third of Slovenia.     Under Austrian rule, things had never been very good for the Slav minorities, though by dint of great efforts, the Slovenes and other Slav groups had built up strong economic foundations under the Austrian Empire, with their own banks, major shipping and industrial companies, and a network of schools and cooperatives. But with the arrival of Italian rule, things began to go from bad to worse. In particular, Mussolini's Fascists made strenuous efforts to squeeze the economic, linguistic and cultural life out of the 500,000 Slovenes in areas occupied by the Italians. The trend continues, for all the pious words of successive Italian administrations.     The continuance of Italian Right wing hypocrisy was exemplified in 1984-86 in telegrams sent to Rome by Triestino Irredentist threatening that the "draft law to protect the Slovene minority would, if implemented, reactions that would be such as to make blood run in the streets of our heartbroken Trieste". The hidden ambition behind such Italian Right wing campaigns is always the same: the destruction of the Slovene minority in Italy and the recovery of the territories in western Slovenia, Istria and Dalmatia, "lost" after Italy's surrender in 1943.     The difference between the minority in Trieste and the other minorities in the Alto Adige and the Val d'Aosta is that behind the South Tyrolers stand the Germans and Austrians, and behind the French in the Val d'Aosta stands France. The Italian Right views the Italian Slovenes as the weak link, because since the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991 behind Trieste has stood only the weak and small republic of Slovenia.     Some advocates of the Slovene minority in Trieste are complacent about the future of Slovene in Trieste and along the border between Italy and Slovenia. "All in all, the position of the Slovene minority is not too bad at the present time," I was told in 1996 by Paolo Ghersina, then a member of the Italian regional parliament of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia identifying with the Slovene minority, "we have our own infrastructure, not just Slovene schools, but Slovene banks and newspapers, TV programmes and a radio station". The Slovenes also have bilingual road signs, bilingual municipalities, and enjoy special status under the Italian Constitution and the 1975 Treaty of Osimo that settled the differences between Italy and the former Yugoslavia, they say.     True, but just try pressing the point and see how far you get.     Even in the allegedly bilingual outer suburb of Opcina, most conversations in public are conducted in Italian. And this is a municipality the two communities are supposedly on an equal footing, a smart suburb with an eccentric tramline that snakes down the mountainside into Trieste's city centre. I occasionally make attempts in primitive Slovene to buy my groceries or beers. Mainly fruitless, I would add. Admittedly, it would be easier to use the language in the smaller villages round about. But if I tried using the language down in the centre of Trieste there could easily be sneers of "S'ciavo" at worst, or feigned ignorance at best. Italian supremacist graffiti are rife, and a crew-cut group with Nazi-like banners parades unhindered regularly in one of Trieste's city squares. It is not a good idea to speak Slovene until you are clear of the city centre. But not many Italians from Trieste speak any Slovene at all. Such bilingualism is simply folksy-touristic: it does not mean a city where both groups have equal rights, let alone where there is a true share of one another's language or culture. It is a cover-up and reeks of the insincerity that Italian-speaking Trieste exudes along with its hatred.     It is clear that the Italian Triestino nationalists are totally opposed to any concessions to bilingualism or multi-culturalism, except to promote publicity from the Tourist Board, anxious to attract European Union funding and tourists. <<< © Bernard Meares 1999 >>>