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The
foiba story
There
is more than one set of foiba pothole horror stories. The foiba
potholes are handy for throwing unwanted objects into, and in
Trieste Province were allegedly used for disposing of bodies during
the 40 days of Partisan rule in 1945, though only a few have
actually been found. The foibas further south in Istria, used
primarily in the autumn of 1943, were another story, but the Italian
Right makes an amalgam of the two.
The foibas in Trieste are a still-fizzing bomb. The most notorious of them is actually a former mine at Basovizza, a Slovene village in the south-eastern corner of Trieste Province, where nearly 600 people were buried after summary executions. Of those buried in the Basovizza mine, 450 have been identified; at least one of these was a Slovene woman, the grandmother of a Slovene friend. One eyewitness account is taken from a report to the Allied military then in occupation of Trieste. It is held in the Public Records Office in London and is worth quoting  :
"On 2 May he went to Basovizza [....] he saw in a neighbouring field about 150 civilians, who it was possible to recognize from their faces as being staff from Italian Police HQ. The populace wanted to lynch them, but the officers of [the Partisan] IV Army stopped them. These people were questioned and tried in the presence of the entire population who were accusing them. As soon as one of them had been interrogated, four or five of the women gathered there would throw stones at them, accusing them of having killed or tortured someone in their family or having set fire to their homes. The accused were kicked and beaten with cudgels and always admitted their guilt [...] All 150 were killed en masse [...] and afterwards, as there were no coffins, their bodies were thrown into the foiba [...] On 3 May I saw at the same place about 250-300 persons. [....] There were only about 40 German soldiers [....] These people were killed after a summary trial. Most were civilians arrested at Trieste". The Basovizza mine, which contains probably about 650 sets of remains, has for many years been plugged with a core of concrete and a national monument was erected over it in the nineteen-eighties. In recent years there has been some tampering with the inscriptions on the memorial stone, apparently to try and increase the numbers of victims allegedly cast into it. Other foibas in the area used for similar purposes, but on a still smaller scale, include those at Gropada and Rupen Tabor, and, inside Slovenia proper, two caves in the Trnovo Forest some 50 km from Trieste were used to hide the bodies of known Slovene anti-Communists or collaborators. Most of the facts have been known for a long time and in Trieste there were a number of trials of those responsible in the post-war period. During the early Communist occupation in Trieste, Gorizia and the Littoral, and the 40 days of Communist rule in Trieste city, some 6000 arrests were made and the prisoners carried off to Communist-controlled areas .
When the Allies finally imposed their rule they found out about the
Yugoslav execution squads. The more objective Italian historians and
statisticians such as Galliano Fogar and Raoul Pupo point to between
1000 and 1800 Italian and Slovene victims. The Red Cross estimates
that 2,250 failed to return ,
in rough agreement with Bogdan Novak who said in 1971 that 4200
Italians returned out of 6000 arrested
.
Paolo Parovel argues that at least one foiba (Rupen Tabor) was used
solely for burying German casualties killed during the uprising in
Trieste in the last few days of German occupation, the period
leading up to 1 May 1945. Ursini-Ursic, Communist mayor of Trieste
at the time, also claimed to me in an interview
that most of the dead in the Trieste foibas were Germans killed
during the last few days of war and that explicit instructions to
cease arrests and release [political] prisoners had been sent out as
early as 14 May 1945". Well, we know in such cases what is done
with instructions of this kind.
On the other hand the Italian Right nowadays smear all Triestino Italian Slovenes with complicity in the 1945 Partisan executions, not just the Communist-led authorities. Right-wing opinion goes further and assumes that the foiba victims were all innocent Italians, and that there were thousands of them. It uses flaky historiography to swell the 1945 executions of maybe 1800 persons and lump them together with all Italian deaths in Yugoslavia during the war, bleating about 'innocent Italians slain in the foibas'. But the deaths were not always executions, not all of the dead were innocent, and, as I have shown, there can be no suspicion of ethnic cleansing. The dead or missing counted by such people are not always Italians either. Sometimes they include Italian casualties from throughout the Italian-occupied Balkans too, along with many other groups. For example, in a 1993 book by Gaetano La Perna
a list of over 6000 dead includes not just those who disappeared in
the foibas or Yugoslav concentration camps but also legitimate
wartime casualties, executions after due process of Fascist
officials, Germans or German collaborators. Finally, many Slovenes
or Croats are listed as Italians because they happened to be Italian
citizens; the fact that they were from the South Slav nations
persecuted by the Italian Fascists does not seem to bother the
author.
Other claims range even higher than La Perna's figures, going as high as 20,000 Italian victims. For these deaths Slovenes in general and Italian Slovenes, in particular, are blamed. For example, in October 1996, Italian Alleanza Nazionale MEP's at Strasbourg tried to block Slovenia's entry into the Council of Europe by unabashedly inventing 'hundreds of thousands of Italian casualties at the hands of 'Slovene' execution squads'. Historical revisionism is particularly blatant in this part of the world. One problem in Italy is the frequent effort to portray all Italians as 'brava gente' [fine people]. The Neo-Irredentists' cavalier attitude to history does not make such attitudes easier to believe. In actual fact, of course, far from hounding Italians as a national group, the Titoist execution squads were largely used for liquidating all internal enemies, irrespective of what group they came from, and in the Trieste area and its hinterlnd they were particularly keen on liquidating anti-Communist Slovenes. One source, for example, reports on an Italian ex-Partisan's pride in his comrades' liquidation of "2500 Yugoslav rebels opposed to Tito
". Such stories are borne out by the massacres at Kocevski Rog,
in the great forests of southern Slovenia, one of a number of sites.
In all, between 10,000 and 12,000 Slovenes, Croats and Serbs were
buried alive or gunned down by execution squads. Some of the victims
may have been former collaborators with the Germans but others were
less compromised anti-Communists who had originally eluded the
Partisans in the closing days of the war and had escaped to Austria.
Many of those massacred had then been handed back to the Yugoslav
Army by special British Army units deployed in Southern Austria,
ironically to keep the Partisans from marching into Carinthia and
bringing the area under Yugoslav rule.
All these shocking figures should be viewed in the light of other brutal episodes of the period, such as 10,000 dead in the settling of accounts all over Northern Italy in 1945-46, the reprisals against collaborators in France at the end of the war, where 10,000 collaborators also lost their lives in summary executions and the like
; and the mass executions and internments in Spain after Franco's
Falangists triumphed in 1939, when upwards of 100,000 Republicans
and their associates may have perished. Not to mention those in the
war in Yugoslavia, still raging at the time of writing (May 1999).
Though Italian Slovenes often seem passive victims of the demonization campaigns of the Italian Right, some in Slovenia sometimes cannot understand why the Italians get so upset about the foibas, particularly the one in Basovizza. After all, they say, it was the Italians who started out with the killings. As early as 1930 the Italians had staged a show trial and execution in Basovizza, shooting four Triestino Slovenes for armed resistance to the enforced Italianization of the area. It was all part of the general suffering of the times, they say. But the Italian Right-wingers seem oblivious to the excesses perpetrated by the Fascists: the 11,000 deaths out of a population of 1 million between 1941 and 1945, the hostages and others executed by the Italian Army outside Ljubljana, the between 1100 and 4500 dead in the prison camp on the island of Rab
in Dalmatia, and those at Gonars in present-day Italy, not far from
Gonars service station on the Venice-Trieste motorway. Not to
mention the complicity of Italian Fascists in the killings at the
infamous SS concentration camp at the Risiera di San Sabba (the San
Saba Rice Factory) in a working class suburb of Trieste, complete
with its own crematorium chimney and run with the able support of
Italian snatch-squads. When it was working full out from the summer
of 1944 until the German surrender in May 1945, this 'transit camp'
was executing up to 150 prisoners a day, including Jews, gypsies,
Partisans or Slovenes rounded up in Trieste and its hinterland. The
bulk of the 2500-4000 victims were Slovenes and Croats, it is
reported .
Incidentally, the Gauleiter of the German Littoral area at the time
was none other than Otto Globocnik, born in Trieste and expelled to
Austria by the Italians in the nineteen-twenties, one of the most
notorious executors of the Final Solution, who came to Trieste fresh
from the Maidanek and Sobibor death camps.
But it is not only the foiba story that brings on paranoia among Slovenes in Trieste. |
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