Streaming experts meet on the initiative of the University of Trieste and the Regional Institute for the History of the Resistance
TRIESTE. During the twentieth century, which many say short and others too long, the former Yugoslav area was characterized by repeated and very serious waves of mass political violence, such as to break through the threshold of genocide. The same happened, albeit to a lesser extent, in the transition belt between the Balkans and Italy, that is the Adriatic border in which we still live today, fortunately more peaceful. Connecting the two events and studying them with different historical and legal approaches is the purpose of a conference to be held tomorrow, obviously online, organized by the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Trieste together with the Regional Institute for History. of the Resistance and of the contemporary age in Friuli Venezia Giulia.
The juridical session will focus on the relationship between human rights and their violation in the former Yugoslavia at the end of the last century: in fact, it was precisely those violations that triggered an international reaction on which the institution of the international tribunal for repression of crimes in the former Yugoslavia. More than three years after the cessation of his duties, the participants in the conference will take the opportunity to investigate two aspects: the first, the possibility of applying the new rules on international crimes even to crimes of more ancient origin, such as genocide and cultural genocide; the second, the effects of the creation of an international tribunal on national jurisdictions, to which the exclusive right of prosecution is normally reserved, as a constitutive element of the sovereignty of a state.
The historical session proposes an even more ambitious objective: to comprehensively examine the logic of the violence that developed in the twentieth century along the Adriatic border. Taken one by one, the various episodes of political violence have been well studied and in some cases with obsessive attention: just think of the massacres of the sinkholes, which in the rest of Italy have only been known in recent decades, while in Trieste and Gorizia are almost part of everyday speech, at least for some generations of Julians. More rarely, however, the individual segments of that path of violence were put in relation to each other and even when this happened, the confrontation was often partial and moreover gladly conducted on an ideological and polemical level: an example for all , the senseless contrast between rice and sinkholes, which has marred decades of debates between the 1970s and the end of the century.
If, on the other hand, we try to take a global look at the dynamics of violence, an elevation profile is drawn with a certain clarity. It starts from a low altitude, with some episodic roughness, in the Habsburg era. Two peaks follow, corresponding to the two world wars and their after-war aftermath. We can call them, respectively, “the season of flames” and “the season of massacres”. The first begins with the fires of the irredentist offices in Trieste in May 1915, continues with those of the Narodni Dom and the socialist offices after the war, to symbolically end with the fire from the San Marco shipyard in 1921. The second has more distant origins, in Yugoslavia occupied by Italian troops, where massacre – that is to say, the use of mass eliminations – is rapidly affirming itself as one of the most used practices of struggle by all the forces in the field. Together with the spread of the partisan movement and therefore of repression, the massacre arrives since 1942 in Venezia Giulia. It first struck Slovenes and Croats, with massacres such as those of Podhum and Ustje and subsequently the Italians with the massacres of the Istrian sinkholes. Then the Germans arrive and the massacres multiply with an impressive frequency, while the “factory of death” in the rice mill of San Sabba is also set up. The massacre continues to a great extent in the transition phase between war and postwar with the new wave of sinkholes, to wedge right into the postwar period with the Vergarolla massacre of 1946.
Behind the evident leap in quality between the two peaks lies the difference between the experience of the First World War, terrible but in which the distinction between military and civilians is generally respected, and the second, where instead civilians become the specific target of military action, whether death falls from the sky or takes the form of mass killings. Between one peak and the next, two rugged plateaus of political violence unfold. The first is marked by the Italian fascist state violence, the second by the Yugoslav communist state violence. Comparing them makes sense, obviously not in a political key, but as a useful way to better understand their objectives, methods and results.
This is what we will try to do tomorrow afternoon, thanks to the contribution of a large group of scholars who will propose new insights on some specific problems, to then reflect together on the general interpretations of a story as dark as it is close.