Meloni Honors Victims on Italy’s Foibe Remembrance Day

Rome: Premier Giorgia Meloni on Monday marked Italy’s Foibe Remembrance Day, emphasizing the importance of paying homage to the victims of the Foibe massacres. These mass killings and deportations were carried out by Tito’s Yugoslav Partisans against Italians in the region stretching from Trieste in Italy’s Friuli Venezia Giulia to the Istrian peninsula and Dalmatia in Croatia during and shortly after World War II.

According to Ansa News Agency, Meloni shared a video from her visit last year to the Foiba of Basovizza, stating, “On the Day of Memory, we pay homage to the victims of the Foibe and to all those who endured the tragedy of the Julian-Dalmatian exodus, a painful page in our history forgotten for too long.” She stressed the significance of remembering as a duty towards truth and justice to honor those who suffered and to pass this memory to future generations. “Italy doesn’t forget,” wrote Meloni.

The Foibe were natural karst sinkholes found in Friuli Venezia Giulia and the Slovenian part of Istria, into which victims were thrown, sometimes alive. The Basovizza Foiba, in particular, was a mineshaft. It is estimated that up to 15,000 Italians, largely but not exclusively identified with Fascism, were tortured or killed by Yugoslav communists who occupied the Istrian peninsula during the last two years of the war. Many of the victims were thrown into narrow mountain gorges during anti-Fascist uprisings, and the exact number remains unknown due to Tito’s forces’ destruction of local population records.

The massacres forced many Italians to flee their homes, and it wasn’t until 2004 that Italy formally recognized Foibe Remembrance Day, as the tragedy had been overlooked by anti-Fascists in the postwar years.