Free Trieste

AN IMPOSSIBLE OATH

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Mayor Dipiazza’s communication about the local Conscription Office and forced conscription of all male citizens of Trieste who were born in year 2000. Read it in English: LINK

They simulate Italian sovereignty over the Free Territory of Trieste. Doing so requires “persuading” Trieste’s people that they are indeed Italian citizens, depriving them of their citizenship de jure of the Free Territory of Trieste and forcing on them the citizens of the bordering Italian Republic.

It is a risky effort, too. Because by doing so, Italian authorities are violating their own law, and local officers violate also their own obligations: the Italian Government’s 1954 special trusteeship mandate over the independent Free Territory of Trieste.

This is subversion against Italy’s whole legal order of Italy, including its very Constitution, and also against the rules-based international order.

Indeed, who it comes to citizenship de jure of the Free Territory of Trieste, that must be attributed pursuant and by virtue of Annexes VI (art. 6) and VII (art. 2, paragraph 4) of the Italian Peace Treaty. An upper-ranking Treaty fully implemented within the Italian legal order.

One of the many consequences of such a deprivation of human rights (citizenship) is that young men from the Free Territory of Trieste are registered within the Italian State’s conscription lists as soon as they reach adulthood. This is like “entering” the Italian State’s Armed Forces, but such a conscription is against the law, including the Italian Military Code.

I wrote before about the forced conscription of Triestines in the Armed Forces of Italy, in post “RESISTING MILITARY SERVICE”. The question is indeed an interesting one.

I accounted an undesirable situation, with systematically stripped of their very identity as a mean of  repression. Because is a young men were to refuse military service in the Italian Armed Forces on grounds of their citizenship of the Free Territory of Trieste, if they were to refuse the “impossible” oath of loyalty, the Italian military authorities would brand him a deserter. And deserters face sentences in military prisons.

Until 2005, the year of military service’s suspension, the recruitment itself was a double deception.

First of all, nobody informed the “recruits” that the Commissioner General extended conscription to Trieste (Decree No. 73 of 7 October 1958), because that would have constituted an admission of Trieste’s independence and provisional administration. Secondly, to hide the legal framework even better, the young men were tricked into requesting to serve as volunteers. How? Asking them to signs some blank paper dismissing it as some “list of belongings” and then filling it up with a request to serve in the Italian army.

The international community’s indifference, other, superiori interests (it was the “Cold War” era, after all) allowed this crime to go on for decades. All while the very authorities in charge of Trieste’s administration oppressed the people whey should have protected. A true paradox, one that  has irremediably damages dozens of thousand of people guilty of being the inconvenient citizens of a State that Italian nationalists refuse to accept is very much real.

It is not over yet. Indeed, the local, administering Italian authorities are still simulating Italian sovereignty over the present-day Free Territory of Trieste. The  Municipality of Trieste, under their control, enlists in the Italian drafting lists Trieste’s young men. As they await a new war…

Translated from blog “Ambiente e Legalità” – “Environment and Legality” by Roberto Giurastante