Anniversary of the Liberation of Italy in Milan.
April 25, 2007 | Pino via Wikimedia Commons
name foibe comes from the name of the sinkholes the twenty-year oppression of the Slovenian and
where the bodies of the victims were thrown. Croatian populations by Italian Fascists in the
The memory of the foibe, with its strong anti-
territories annexed to Italy after the First World War,
Communist imprint, has become one of the strongest or to the Italian occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941-43,
icons of all the Italian right, including the League of which was stained by serious war crimes.
Bossi and Salvini. In March 2004, on the proposal
The institutionalization of the Day of
of AN and with the support of all parties except the Remembrance has provided the right with a very
extreme left, the Parliament approved a law that effective channel to spread its version of the
introduced a “Day of Remembrance” in the civil phenomenon of the foibe, decrying it as an act of
calendar in memory of the victims of the foibe and “genocide” committed against unarmed victims –
of the 250 thousand Italians expelled from Istria and it became, in other words, a campaign of “ethnic
Dalmatia. cleansing” against Italians hunted down for no
Always a key element in the memory of the
other reason than their nationality. This supported
war cultivated by the neo-Fascist right, the martyrs a process of equating Communist violence with the
of the foibe have thus become part of the national German one, to the point that the rightist mass-
public memory. There can be no doubt that it was media are currently labelling the foibe as the “Italian
important to raise awareness about these dramatic Shoah”.
events, but it is also true that it was done without
How did the forces traditionally linked to
any critical reflection. Indeed, the neo-Fascist the different cultures of anti-Fascism react?
narrative of the immediate post-war period which Three distinct attitudes can be identified: full-
denounced the foibe as the fruit of Communist blown opposition, “change of allegiance”, and a
Yugoslav expansionism and hatred of Italy has willingness to compromise. As a reaction to the
now been revived, without including any historical new offensive of the right wing, an energetic
context: that is to say, without any reference to movement of opposition emerged in defence of the
EUROPE INSIGHT
39