Free Trieste

Statement about former Zone B

Statement about former Zone B

The Free Trieste Movement stands for the rights of Trieste’s people locally and internationally, not on the bases of political ideas, but on the bases of an undeniable system of international legislation, and this is the true strength of the Movement’s actions, and the fundamental resource to save Trieste.

This international corpus juris is summed up and consolidated in Free Trieste’s “Act of complaint and notice of default” officially notified to Italian and international authorities on June 18th, 2013 in order to open – even within international law – the procedures needed to free Trieste, which indeed are gaining increasing attention from the International Community.

The Movement’s competitors have nothing to oppose to this effective, tireless action. And this is why, since July 2013, they try to divert the battle from the legal framework to the political or to the emotional level. They do so with a hammering, revolting campaign made of deceptive claims, fake news, hostile inventions, and plain defamation. Their goal is discrediting Free Trieste, threaten its management board, as well as its members and supporters.

This is why, facing this attempt to distract Trieste’s people from standing together for their rights – which are real and undeniable – it is necessary remaining focused on the legal frameworks that consolidates their legitimate interests enough to overcomes their – understandable – differences in both individual aspirations and emotions.

This hostile campaign does also attempt to trigger emotional reactions and hostility by reopening the well-known question of the Free Territory of Trieste’s “zone B” and, in order to do so, it is staging a role-play, accusing the Movement to be either giving up on it or to be claiming it, from time to time.

Both accusations are false. The Free Trieste Movement consists of several different people with many personal political orientations on different topics, including the historical aspect of this topic. Yet, all of them consider it their primary duty and goal defending, here and now, Trieste’s rights and the working opportunities in the midst of an ongoing crisis that, if nothing changes, is to ultimately drown their city into marginalization, corruption, and misery.

Just like a surgeon does not use opinions or personal preferences to save a patient whose life is in danger, using the necessary medical tools that best suite the emergency instead, the Free Trieste Movement must only use the instruments of the real legal situation that is immediately and effectively enforceable.

To this day, the real legal situation is the one represented in the Movement’s Notice of Default which, therefore is once again an important reading, and does also explain the question of “zone B” and of its present legal status, which the opponents of the Free Territory hide and deny.

In short: for the scope and purposes outlined in the document, the International Community has never amended the effects of the Italian Peace Treaty and of the Memorandum of Understanding of London only when it comes to the legal status of main “zone A” (Trieste, international Free Port, municipalities nearby). The area does therefore remain the present-day Free Territory entrusted to the Italian Government’s (not to the Italian State’s) temporary civil administration under a special trusteeship mandate. This is the framework in which Question Trieste can be opened today, and such terms are those needed to save and revive Trieste.

On the contrary, the Yugoslav Government – in charge of administering “zone B” – has ceased to exist. And its mandate was never entrusted to the Governments of the new States of Slovenia and of Croatia. Instead, the International Community has rather recognized their present-day borders, which include former “zone B”. This resulted in a change of legal status (1991-92) by the will of all UN Member States and of all signatories of both the Italian Peace Treaty and the aforementioned MoU.

Opening the question of “zone B” in our days, even in good faith and for seemingly understandable political-economic points, would therefore divert the front of the main action for the Free Territory of Trieste from absolute legal certainty about the international legal status in force in “zone A” to a secondary front, one where those laws and rights do no longer apply, and this means facing a certain defeat that would do nothing but wearing out and weakening also the battle for Trieste.

It is right for this reason that all those who oppose to the Free Territory of Trieste (political parties, profiteers, services, etc.) are trying and are going to try again, by all possible means and deceptions, from press disinformation to pressing on the internet, to simulate that the Free Trieste Movement wants to re-open the question of “zone B” – or to go as far as to drive it in a deadly trap by having it actually re-open it.

This is why, once again, the Movement is once again repeating as firmly as ever the position it expressed in the Act of Complaint. Furthermore, the Movement invites everybody, both its supporters and political opponents, to read and analyse it carefully and as seriously as possible. Because all of us have one main, urgent duty: saving the city, the international Free Port and, even before them, our own people who are drowning in rampant unemployment and misery because, otherwise, they shall remain hopeless.

So let us leave disinformation and political talk to those responsible of the disaster that we alone are working to solve for real.

The Free Trieste Movement‘s Management Board.

The present-day Free Territory of Trieste corresponds with once "Zone A". Since 1991-92, former "Zone B" belongs to Slovenia and to Croatia.