A memorial to the victims of the Foibe
massacres, the mass killings and deportations by Tito's Yugoslav
Partisans of Italians living in the area that stretches from the
Trieste zone in Italy's Friuli Venezia Giulia region across the
Istrian peninsula to Dalmatia in Croatia during and immediately
after WWII, was found to have been vandalized on Saturday.
The memorial of the Basovizza Foiba, near Trieste, was defaced
with graffiti declaring 'Trst je nas' (Trieste is ours) and two
other statements in Slovenian, two days before Italy's Foibe
Remembrance Day.
Most of the Foibe were natural pit-like karst sinkholes
typically found in Friuli Venezia Giulia and the Slovenian part
of Istria into which victims were thrown, sometimes alive.
The Basovizza Foiba, however, was a mineshaft.
It is estimated that as many as 15,000 Italians largely, but not
always, 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 the narrow mountain gorges
during anti-Fascist uprisings in the area and the exact number
of victims of these atrocities is unknown, in part because
Tito's forces destroyed local population records to cover up
their crimes.
Many Italians were forced to flee their homes because of the
massacres.
Italy established Foibe Remembrance Day only in 2004, as the
tragedy had been swept under the carpet by anti-Fascists in the
postwar years.
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