Council of Foreign Ministers Files: Lot M–88: CFM London Documents
Statement by the Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister (Kardelj) to the Council of Foreign Ministers
Italian Peace Treaty: Yugoslav Frontier and Trieste
reply of yugoslav representative to views of italian government
The following is a record of a statement made by M. Kardelj at the Tenth Meeting of the Council on 18th September in reply to the views expressed on behalf of the Italian Government (see C.F.M.(45) 27) at the Ninth Meeting of the Council:—
“It is the wish of the people of Yugoslavia to live in peace with the Italian people. We have proved this in practice by the way in which we disarmed the Italian Army after its capitulation and by our treatment of Italian civilians in Yugoslavia and in the areas of Italy which the Yugoslavs have occupied. But friendship cannot be established by words alone. The history of Yugoslav-Italian relations has been filled with disagreements; and for the last thirty years Italy, in combination with Germany, has been a country from which misfortune has always come for Yugoslavia. It is therefore wrong to say that the friendship between the two countries has only been undermined during this war. It was undermined in the last war by the London Agreement,96 by which the Italians claimed not only the Julian March but the Dalmatian coast.
[Page 259]It is not true to say that Yugoslavia freely accepted the Rapallo Treaty or that that Treaty represented a stable agreement. That Treaty was concluded only after five years of continual struggle by Yugoslavia against the London Agreement, and after two years of difficult and determined negotiations during which Italy adhered to a thesis which would have meant continued slavery for hundreds of thousands of our people.
The same is true of the Wilson Line, which was put forward, not as an ideal frontier, but as an attempt to compromise between the obligations of the Allies to Italy and the views of the people of Yugoslavia. It left to Yugoslavia in the Julian March 200,000 people of whom 30,000 were Italians. To the west of the line were 750,000 inhabitants, of whom 450,000 were Yugoslavs. It therefore represents no sacrifice by Italy in the cause of the peace in the Adriatic.
The Italian representative rightly said that Trieste could not develop naturally without proper communications with the hinterland. He therefore demanded that over half a million Yugoslavs should be annexed to Trieste and that Yugoslavia should give Italy special privileges on the railways. This claim recalls the mentality of egoism and territorial ambition which has led Italy to catastrophe in this war.
As regards the mines on the eastern shore of Istria, in territory completely inhabited by Croatians, the Italian representative based his argument on the thesis that Yugoslavia already has 16 anthracite mines and is rich in coal, whereas Italy has very little. These facts are not correct. Yugoslavia has no anthracite mines. Before the war Yugoslavia imported annually 200,000 tons of coal. She also imported all the special types of coal required for her heavy industry, and coal is now more than ever necessary to Yugoslavia. It is, however, more important to realise that, in this kind of thinking, one can see the same mentality on the part of the Italians of which I spoke earlier. Italy has no coal and therefore wants Istria. She also has no oil and so tomorrow will demand Albania. This reminds one of the old arguments of Fascist Italy. I see nothing democratic or just in the argument that people should lose their national liberty because of one coal mine.
There are many other errors in the statement made by the Italian representative, and that is particularly true as regards ethnical statistics. The Italian figures have no real basis. It is true that there are no reliable statistics about the nationalities in the Julian March: such statistics as do exist are all aimed at reducing the apparent numbers of the Yugoslav population. If any credence is to be given to any of these statistics, most attention should be paid to the figures [Page 260] of the Austrian census of 1910, though even those were directed against the Slovene population. But even on those figures the Slovene population was in the majority, and Salvemini96a has admitted this on the basis of the Austrian statistics.
Practical experience during the war shows clearly where the Julian March begins. In the zone under Allied occupation on the side of the ethnographical frontier inhabited by Yugoslavs there is not a single village where a Slovene or Croat Liberation Committee has not been established. Those Committees continue to exist today. None of these villages has accepted an Italian Commissioner or disavowed its own National Liberation Committee.
It is true that there is no such thing as an ideal ethnographical line. But this line is the nearest thing to it. Hardly any mixed boundary belt exists: there is a sharp line almost everywhere between the Slovene and the Italian villages; only the towns are areas of mixed population.
As regards the political arguments adduced, the Italian representative said that Yugoslavia had deported thousands of Italians from the Julian March and referred to their sufferings in Zara. I do not know what he had in mind. It is true that in the first days of the Yugoslav occupation of this area many Fascists fled into Italy. It is also true that Mussolini’s Italian troops fought in this area, and that many of them were killed and captured. But the prisoners have been released from the camps in Yugoslavia, and, if some have not yet returned to Italy, there cannot be many such. There are no Italian civilians interned in Yugoslavia. Even in the foreign newspapers which are hostile to Yugoslavia, the largest figure given for Italians who have “disappeared” in Yugoslavia and the Julian March is 3,000. As regards Zara, this has a population of only 14,000 and all its inhabitants are still living there.
I can understand that the Italian representative is interested in the Italian minorities in Yugoslavia, for the Italian Government has done all in its power to ensure that this minority while living in Yugoslav territory should continue to enjoy its full national life. He did not, however, mention Italy’s responsibility for what the Italian army has done in Yugoslavia during the war. The Italian army occupied one-third of the territory of Yugoslavia and, up to the time of her capitulation, 437,956 Yugoslavs, civilian and military, had been killed in this area, 131,250 had been disabled, 7,450 had been held as prisoners of war, 109,437 had been interned in concentration camps, (this figure did not include the population of the Julian March), 84,512 had been employed on forced labour, 122,430 had been deported and 87,215 had been forcibly mobilised.
[Page 261]The Italian representative asked that we should forget what Italy has done. This is the argument used by the Japanese. The sacrifices of Yugoslavia during the war have been enormous. I do not demand revenge, nor do I demand that our frontiers should extend into Italian territory. All that Yugoslavia demands is that the Julian March should be given to Yugoslavia and that its people should be re-united with their brothers.
To make Trieste a free city under an international regime is no solution from either the economic or the political point of view. The economic argument on this point was given this morning. As regards the political argument, Fiume is not a good precedent. It was a free city up to the time that the Italians occupied it. The same might happen in the case of Trieste if it were left with Italy. If it were restored to Yugoslavia, all the countries interested in the port would have a guarantee that their economic interests will be protected by Yugoslavia under whose control it will be a free port, as was stated this morning.
I appeal to the Council to give the closest attention to our case, since peace cannot be permanently established until the right of the smaller nations to live their own lives freely and in peace is guaranteed.”
- For text of the agreement between France, Russia, Great Britain and Italy, signed at London, April 26, 1915, see British Cmd. 671, Misc. No. 7 (1920).↩
- Gaetano Salvemini, lecturer on the history of Italian civilization at Harvard University since 1933, and author of several hooks on Italian affairs.↩