Bernard MEARES - Where the Balkans begin

    The persistence of this tension, that the Slovene barmaid's remarks showed is still alive, is surprising to an outsider because though nineteenth century Trieste city centre had a majority of Italian speakers, they were themselves often not of Italian origin. Rather they were drawn from large communities of Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Armenians, Jews, Serbs and Greeks. More than half of the Trieste phone book consists of names that resound with Balkan overtones from Capodistria to Constantinople. Their nineteenth century ancestors used Italian as a lingua franca, but for most of them Italy was probably not the mother country that the Irredentists claimed it was. The bulk of the new labouring classes were drawn from the nearby South Slav lands of Croatia and Slovenia, and the Slovene settlements stretched right down into the city. Originally, the tiny historical centre of Trieste had been Italian populated while the surrounding suburbs were made up of Slav speakers. They had begun settling in Trieste city as the port burgeoned, particularly following the arrival of the railway from Vienna in 1857 and the consequent opening-up of trade to the huge hinterland of Central Europe and the Balkans. Incidentally, though two major writers from the British Isles, the English writer and translator Richard Burton and the great Irish novelist James Joyce, both lived in Trieste for many years, there is no evidence that either received much of an impression of either Slovene or Croat.
    In their era few of the incoming Slavs wanted to be dubbed as Slovene, for fear of being taken as rednecks or country bumpkins from "that people without a history", in nineteenth century Italian nationalist parlance. In particular for the sake of their education or careers, most non-Italian city dwellers in Trieste gradually came to consider themselves as Italian, particularly those of Slav origin. Some of the most outstanding thinkers in Trieste with Slav surnames threw in their lot with the Italian cause.
    The Italian lobby in Trieste under Austrian rule dates back to the period of Empress Maria-Theresa. It was a way of clinging to privilege, and in time the Austrian government heavily relied on the 'Italian' bourgeoisie to rule the city. The racist Triestino Italian disparaging of the Slav groups, was originally just a strategy to that end. But the Trieste bourgeoisie gradually became a prisoner of its own myths, says Paolo Parovel, paradoxically because many of its members were themselves of Slav origin and could not be seen as being soft on "S'ciavi". Trieste's 'Italian' rulers in fact often came from families of Uncle Toms.
    The original Italian-speaking core of old Trieste always felt threatened by the large Slav populations surrounding it. And following the French Revolution and the collapse of the Venetian Empire, the intellectuals and bourgeoisie of the city were gradually drawn into the general movement for Italian national unity, and by extension also with the drive to take for Italy the allegedly Italian-populated but Austrian ruled territories all across North East Italy and down the Dalmatian coast, known as Italia Irredenta -- "unredeemed Italy". The old centre of Trieste city may have been Italian-speaking but until Fascist times its inner suburbs were not much more Italian than the completely Slav hinterland. In the same way the neighbouring small Venetian towns of Istria also had varying admixtures of Slav or bilingual populations sucked in from their predominantly Slav outskirts. The pity was that the Italian-speaking townsfolk too were aroused by Italian nationalists to a fear of being swamped by the Slav rural masses, though that was where the bulk of them came from.
    Irredentism and particularly its Trieste variety was extraordinarily braggart even before Trieste was taken over by Italy in 1918:
"The Italian spirit (Italianità in the original) is affirmed by imposing it on the foreign populations. And this is an ideal which will only be finished with the conquest of the world. Until then it will not be over ", said Ruggero Timeus,

one of the most extreme Trieste nationalists, adding: "no Triestino, because of the natural contempt we have for the Slavs, cares about their rights".
Sometimes the Slovenes seem unwilling to defend their own interests. It was always a mystery to me that they never ask why the Irredentists never claim Corsica and Nice, historically far more populated by Italians, but insist on ruling over the German-inhabited South Tyrol and the Slav areas of Slovenia, Trieste and Dalmatia. After all, the Neo-Irredentists do not give a fig for treaties that the Italian state has entered into in more recent times such as the Treaty of Osimo, so why should they care about agreements entered into by Count Cavour over Nice or the Genovese republic over Corsica.

It is surprising why there should have been such political fear of the Slovenes, as not only were they relatively passive, demanding only a minimum of rights, but also electorally they were always gerrymandered by the ruling Italian bourgeoisie, in Trieste city at least, with the connivance of Vienna. Matters were not helped though, when in the nineteenth century the Slovenes countered Italian Irredentism with a tilt towards the Austrian rulers. Their loyalty to the Austrian crown was viewed as a threat by the Trieste oligarchy which wanted the Slavs to be viewed as "nations without a history" in contradistinction to the "civilised" Italians. Among the few who stood up against nationalist fools like Timeus, was Scipio Slataper

, who replied to Timeus: "Because you behave like barbarians it is natural that you should fear the barbarians......You want the Slavs to be barbarians....." The nationalists apparently felt particularly threatened by the emerging Slovene cultural and economic institutions: reading rooms and libraries, theatres, schools, cooperative associations and banks, as well as purely nationalist bodies.
    After the handover to Italy of Trieste and Venezia-Giulia (the Slav/Italian borderland, which included Istria), most of the German and Slovene-speaking civil servants moved to Austria or monarchist Yugoslavia. A special new administration for colonizing the new territories was sent up from Rome, staffed more or less entirely by Italianized apparatchiks. Their numbers were swollen by imported Irredentist colonizers who fanned out across what they called the Julian March (the Slovene Littoral) and enforced the provisions for totally Italianizing the non-Italian populations. Thus, in Trieste the former fighters for Italian national freedom from the Austrians now trampled on the new ranks of oppressed Slav minorities, the Slovenes, and the Croats further south in Istria. But nationalism was ever thus.
    The incidents began to multiply. Irredentist militias were founded, linked to the special administration, which began to foment incidents against Slovenes and Croats immediately. The Fascist "squadre d'azione" were born in Trieste. One of their very first actions, under Fascist leader Francesco Giunta, on 12 July 1920, was to burn down the Slovene National Centre, which housed the Slovene theatre, the community's archives and various other groupings such as coop:
     , "panic in a community whose rights are denied, and which in 1920 was an impotent bystander as its national theatre (the Narodni Dom) in the centre of Trieste went up in flames. [That spectacle] seized the schoolchildren present and wiped out their image of the future forever. The cloud the colour of blood that rose above the port, the unhinged Fascists who sprayed petrol onto the imposing building and then danced alongside the flames of the pyre -- all that was branded on my child's mind and traumatized it for the rest of my life.......From our youth, they extirpated all illusion of our self-awareness and got us used to the idea of absolute, apocalyptic evil."

    Here he is writing about the Italian Fascists in Trieste in his 1971 work Nekropol

, a memoir built around his confinement to Nazi concentration camps for Slovene nationalist activities after the Germans annexed the Littoral in the wake of the Italian surrender in 1943.
Incidentally, the oh-so-multicultural Trieste School of Interpreters squats on the reconstructed premises of this building, and refuses to give it back to its rightful owners, the Slovene community of Trieste, except under onerous financial conditions.

Few voices were raised in protest at Irredentist attitudes to the Slavs or at the Italianization of non-Slav lands after the First World War. The governing attitude seemed to be "to the victors the spoils", irrespective of any principles that might have been mouthed in Versailles by US president Woodrow Wilson . As can be seen in work by Triestino Italian academics and writers Angelo Ara and Claudio Magris

, a few socialists and individuals of mixed antecedents did warn that Italian Trieste was turning away from its economic wellsprings in order to feed its yearning for unification with Italy, but from the nationalist came nothing but the same outpourings of venom. One of the most prominent Irredentists, Giani Stuparich who himself came from Hungary and was later to regret his denial of rights for minorities, summed up Italian attitudes to the Slovenes, describing them as having "an innate sense of servility, forming part of an obscure, defeated nation bent over the plough and under the boot of masters stronger and more civilized than themselves"

. Few Triestino writers were prepared to gainsay his words.
In Italian occupied Slovenia during the nineteen-twenties after the burning of the Slovene Centre, when the community's archives were destroyed, in short order most Slovene institutions were shut down, squeezed out or taken over. The Banca Adriatica/Jadranska banka, its leading bank, was closed down (1925), Slovene was suppressed in schools (1923-1930), the public use of Slovene was banned (l927), the Slovene language press and Slovene cooperatives were shut down (1928). Over 700 teachers were forced out of the Slovene areas either into teaching posts far from home or to Slovenia. Some 100, 000 of the million Slovenes of the Italian-occupied Littoral went into exile, emigrated or were deported into the interior of Italy, many were imprisoned and some were executed. Even the Catholic church was not spared. The Slovene clergy was largely replaced by Italians, two bishops were dismissed, more than 50 priests were interned and 200 banished. Most spitefully and humiliatingly, by Fascist fiat all Slovenes were forced to change their Slav surnames to Italian equivalents, and if they refused they were simply allotted Italian names on a random basis. In a particularly low blow, the Fascists even changed the names of the dead, by having Slovene names on gravestones altered, turning Slovene cemeteries into Italian ones. As the nationalist Serbs realized in their campaigns in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo it is important to destroy a nation's cemeteries as well as its historical records; Mussolini set a good example in the excision of national memory.

In Trieste there is always oppression in the air, as the Slovene barmaid knew all too well, and the effects of ethnic cleansing are clear enough for those who are prepared to lift up the mask of multiculturalism. The phrase 'ethnic cleansing' was actually invented for Trieste under Fascist rule in the nineteen-thirties, when the words 'bonifica etnica' (ethnic improvement) circulated in the Trieste press, as part of the campaign to Italianize the Slavs or replace them with "autochthonous Italian elements", whoever the latter may have been

.
Where Italian efforts to repress the Slovenes were gratuitously vicious before the war, after 1945 they kept a show of respect for the law, the Italians initially looking over their shoulders at the Allied Military Government (AMG). The British and Americans occupied the city and its surrounds from 1945 to 1954 but speedily came to lean on the Italian authorities to administer the city, and steadily handed over the entire province to Italy. Indeed the Allied Military Government reintroduced the Fascist anti-Slovene laws and stood by as pro-Yugoslav buildings were burned down. Until the eve of Fascist rule Trieste had never formed part of Italy or any of the latter's precursor states such as Venice. In the first free elections after the war in 1949, up to 60 percent of its native-born population (as opposed to immigrants during the Italian Fascist period and refugees from Communist rule in Yugoslavia) voted against union with Italy

.
    However, Italian nationalists in Trieste, conveniently forgetting the 20 years' nightmare of Fascist rule suffered by the Slovenes of the Littoral, lashed out. In May 1945 the Forty Days of Titoist Yugoslavia's control had frightened the Triestino middle classes and conservatives, because of the drastic changes to the economy, the arrests, and the grim rumours about summary executions. One and a half months after the Titoist take-over, Anglo-American troops forced out the Yugoslav army and partisans in a show of strength. Shortly afterwards the Allies would start to make a great play about turning Trieste into a Free City, while stealthily handing it back to Italy, despite the well-justified loathing for the Italian State of the Slovenes in its highland Karst environs.
    As Istria and the coast further south came definitively under Yugoslav Communist rule, most Istrian Italians fled their homes under the recurrent waves of oppression that shook Communist Yugoslavia. The nationalists of Trieste and the refugees from Istria quietly took their revenge on the Slovene minority in Trieste; most of the Yugoslavs who fled were not allowed to remain in Trieste.
    But from 1950 onwards Italian refugees from Titoist Yugoslavia and Italian immigrants from elsewhere were settled on the Slovene-populated corridor around Trieste in the same way as Israeli settlements are established on the West Bank of the Jordan. The Istrian exiles and other Italians were encouraged to move in with all manner of subsidies to firms and individuals, and Trieste was made a special development zone, a status that it still enjoys. To take an example, Italian petrol is generally the most expensive in Europe yet Trieste residents still have a ration of 120 litres a month at less than half price. Easy term loans and tax breaks are not likely to be offered to Slovenes.
    The Italian resettlement programme was concentrated on lands obtained by compulsory purchase orders, or in hitherto largely Slovene suburbs and villages of the Karst. Simultaneously there was consistent pressure on Slovenes to leave the Trieste corridor. At least to begin with, it was a deliberate programme to change the face of communities where the massive Slovene majorities had even survived thirty years of Fascist repression. Resistance to purchases by the Slovene municipalities was overcome by the sweeping powers of Italian government-appointed prefects. All the five largest predominantly Slovene administrative districts were gradually Italianized. Great swathes of land were either extracted either from the huge traditionally-managed common lands on the Karst or from freehold peasant farmers, 90% of whom had been Slovenes. They were then handed over to the new settlers. Similar compulsory purchase orders were used to gobble up tracts of equally Slovene-occupied rural lowland Trieste for transformation into industrial areas or scientific complexes, many of them unsuitably located in economic terms.
    Slovenes in Trieste believe that the combined measures were intended to squeeze the refractory Slovene population into a permanently minority situation, or get rid of it entirely through assimilation, emigration, and continued application of the humiliating Fascist laws reinstated by the Allied Military Government. Some of these persisted for a long time, such as the Fascist ban on Slav names, which was only abrogated in 1968.

    Whenever the Triestino Slovenes succeed in dealing with one smear by the Italian Right-wing politicians and authorities, another arises. Such slurs waste a lot of the Slovene community's energies in defensive arguments.
    Two examples are the stories of the foibas and the collapse of the Slovene-owned Banco di Credito.