Italy Recalls the Foibe Massacres by Communists

On the anniversary last week of the Foibe massacres, Italy has opened a museum to remember the victims of the Foibe, which is a name for a certain type of deep ravines on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, which were the scene of atrocities committed during the Second World War by Communists. Communist partisans under Josep Broz Tito massacred 15,000 Italian civilians from 1943 to 1945 in the former Yugoslavia in Italy and in what is now Slovenia and Croatia by throwing them into the foibe. Tito went on to become the dictator of Yugoslavia until his death in 1980. The partisans, who were fighting the Axis, targeted Italian fascists, but other non-fascist Italians were also victimized. The Italian population of the Istrian Peninsuala and Dalmatia was largely “ethnically cleansed,” to borrow a phrase invented in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia by Serbs inspired by the Serbian Communist Yugoslav dictator at the time, as the many ethnic Italians who lived there were forcibly removed and their lands seized. The Communists tried to cover their crimes by destroying village population records. Leftwing anti-fascists had ever since ignored the Foibe massacres with a “wall of silence,” as the Italian President said in this year’s commemoration of the massacre, but in recent decades, Italy has treated the Foibe similarly to the various massacres committed by the Nazis against Italian civilians during the war, after Italy had joined the Allies in a War of Liberation. As there were tens of millions of victims of Communism around the world, it is easy to forget some of the individual incidents, even one that victimized thousands, but it is important to remember heinousness of the atrocities and the humanity of the victims, lest the evil ideology of Marxism become attractive again.