Bernard MEARES - Where the Balkans begin

    Scarcely had the foiba issue faded from the headlines than in October 1996 the Italian national bank shut down the Triestino Slovene owned Banca di Credito di Trieste/Trzaska Kreditna Banka. It had debts of nearly 600 million lire (about 50 million dollars), double its capital. The Italian government said it would make no exception for the bank and would not bail it out. However, the debts were peanuts by Italian standards, one tenth of the debts of the Banco di Napoli and the Banco Ambrosiano, both of which the Italian government salvaged. The Kreditna Bank was more important for the local economy than the Banco di Napoli was for Naples. Moreover, the losses of the Banco Ambrosiano were huge and the associated scandals dragged in the Catholic Church, leaving behind a stench of Masonic and Mafia involvement and and at least one corpse, that of Roberto Calvi, one of its executives, found hanging under Charing Cross Bridge in London.
    Such parallels are bound to exacerbate the Triestino Slovenes' penchant for paranoia. The Kreditna Banka had been in the hands of an Italian national "auditing commission" for some time, could have been cleaned up and in the end was revamped, but on 23 October 1996 all trading was suspended on instructions from the Italian National Bank. Two former directors were accused of fraud.
    Its closure harmed a large segment of the Slovene minority economy, including that of several industries in Slovene hands, trading links with Eastern Europe, and many Italian Slovenes who kept their savings in the bank or had their salaries paid through it. It was responsible for paying some 30,000 pensioners scattered through the border area of Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. The Triestino Slovene historian Boris M. Gombac assured me in conversation that there was suspicion that the shutdown had been plotted in advance, "as was the revival of the foiba story". Milan Pahor, an economist from Trieste University, said more or less the same, at a talk in Prosek/Prosecco on 27 October 1996. He asserted that it was a re-run of the forced closure of the Jadranska Banka/Banca Adriatica in 1925, a crucial stage in the deliberate crushing of the considerable Italian Slovene economy of the nineteen-twenties by the Fascist State:
    "The history of the Slovene minority in Trieste is a cyclical one. Every so often the same episodes occur as before the war or in the nineteen-forties; we had the foiba story six months ago, now it is the tale of corrupt bank directors, and when we have got over that, the Right will invent something else. They're probably at it already."

    Even the usually pliable Trieste Slovene daily, Primorski Dnevnik, smelled a rat; in an editorial on 30 October 1996 it said that the "assertion that no Italian bank was interested in cleaning up the Kreditna, according to our information, just does not hold water." Everyone admits though that the bank was extraordinarily lax in its financing operations. One of the problems in Trieste is not that many people smell rats; it is that there are so many rats for them to smell.
    The beliefs of the then Right Wing Italian daily Il Piccolo can be seen in such statements as "It's no mystery for anyone that the influence of the Belgrade political police was crucial in the bank's Slovene-dominated 'economic commission'"

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In Italy in general and Trieste in particular the system of Italian State subsidies for local newspapers makes for lax journalistic ethics. In the Trieste case both the Italian Piccolo and the Slovene language Primorski Dnevnik get money from the government, the latter also receiving funding under the programme of "support for minorities". The subsidies actually keep the Slovene journalists in line so they do not challenge the government on its failure to implement undertakings to protect the Slovene minority. "Would you stick your neck out if you were a journalist in those conditions" asked one well informed retired Englishman in this city. "Would you let it be known that the Italian government had failed on its commitments to the Slovene minority?"
Some people think that the Kreditna Bank was sunk by the finagling of the Italian arms industry, which may no longer have an interest in financing arms buying for the overarmed Balkans, particularly while a kind of a peace prevails in Bosnia. Brescia in Northern Italy is the centre of the Italian arms industry, and it is true that the trigger for the bank's collapse was the sudden and massive withdrawal of the Banca Popolare di Brescia's large holdings in the Kreditna. Others see a darker picture, the long hand of the Italian Foreign Ministry (the Farnesina) and Italian intelligence, out to do down the Slovene minority at all costs. People from outside Trieste tend to be a bit sniffy about such matters, one well-established foreign journalist in Italy arguing that "the Farnesina is about as active as a bunch of lizards sunning themselves on a sunlit wall. One might doubt that the Italian Foreign Ministry is skilled enough to manage such a power play, as more often than not the main assets of the Farnesina are inefficiency, fine bridge playing, and general geographical ignorance of where places like Slovenia are situated".