PROBLEM OF POLA

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 93, 12 February 1947, Page 3

PROBLEM OF POLA

FATE OF ITALIANS

The Peace Treaty, framed in Paris, gave Pola to Yugoslavia, and the large Italian population of this area has come under the Tito regime. Chafing under this unwelcome occupancy, Pola is now an unhappy centre of listlessness and doubts. For many months Pola has been an isolated Anglo-American enclave at the tip of the Yugoslav-occupied Istrian peninsula. It was never a very stimulating place, although its Fascist career as a submarine base probably gave it a bustling, bawdy air, which might have passed far gaiety to a sailor or shore leave, or 'for prosperity to a shopkeeper with memories of the days when the town was little more than a fishing village. Now that its future has'been decided it is anything but gay and prosperous. Allied bombing has turned most of the big modern buildings into shells as useless as the arena which.will stand to symbolise

;he days of Roman g'randeur.- Shops

with empty shelves speak of shopkeepers who have evacuated themselves and their goods to Trieste or Italy.

The ship yards and the flour mills are moving their machinery out of Tito's reach. But for the efforts and expenditure of the occupying Allied forces; the town's commercial life would be at a standstill.

Under the stimulus of the Fascist war-wearied economy, Pola's population grew to 32,000, 'of whom about 30,000 were Italians. As far as the Italian citizen of Pola is concerned, he cannot see mjuch beyond the fact that he will be losing his independence, his moderate prosperity and (or so Italian propagandists whisper in his ear) perhaps even his life. , Italian officials like to claim that

of the 30,000 Italians in Pola, 28,000 have registered their to leave the city before Yugoslav "rule is established. Some few months ago, when there were' still faint hopes that Byrnes and Bevin might insist on Pola remaining in Italy or

in the Trieste free zone, there were' reports of "Italian refugees fleeing, from the Yugoslavs" and ships in Pola harbour being besieged by ter-ror-stricken refugees.

Like many another horror report from the Istrian peninsula, this seems to have been largely Italianinspired propaganda and now that the tumult and the shouting have died down statistics show, fewer than 1000 Italians have left the town.

As for the 28,000 who are said to have signed the register to leave, Allied officials think the genuine signatures number about 15,000 and they will be very surprised if much more than a third of these actually moves when the time conies.

Those who firmly intend to leave are those who can take something substantial with them—a small factory plant, a shop's stock-in-trade, a professional skill—or ■ those who have been so closely identified with anti-Communist movements that to remain would be inviting reprisals. Both groups are moving on political rather than nationalistic grounds for Tito's nationalisation plans are not attractive to business people, whether they be-Italian or Yugoslav.

As for the majority—well, Pola is the town they were born in, or the town they were married in, or the town where they have a roof over their heads, or the town where for any of a hundred such personal reasons they would rather stay than face the effort, the problems and the uncertainties of moving.

Unless there is an officially arranged and financed transfer of populations, it seems that most of

the Italians in Pola will stay on under Yugoslav rule to make the best of what they expect to be a bad situation. ,

I lunched with Antonio, a young Italian school teacher in Pola, who had recently arrived from the Yugo-slav-Occupied port of Flume, states a correspondent. He introduced me to his friend Guiseppe, an engineering student who, as one of the Italian partisans, had fought with the Yugoslavs against the Germans. Both of them had been Communists but, they said, after first-hand experience of Tito's methods, they had changed their views.

I asked them whether they would stay in Yugoslav-ruled Pola. "Not if we can go anywhere else," they agreed, "but where can we go? It costs money to move, especially if you have a wife and children."

"What if you don't -go," I said, "will you resist Yugoslav control?" "Certainly," said Antonio, but Guiseppe was not so sure. "Some young men may," he said, "but what' can they do?" I asked them how the people felt about the peace-treaty decisions. "Most of them haven't realised what it all means," said Antonio. "They

won't until the Yugoslavs move in. Then they'll realise it soon enough." But it was Guiseppe who summed it up. "Perhaps it was necessary, perhaps it was even right to give Pola to Tito," he said, "but you can't expect us to feel good about it, We don'.t make the peace treaties. We just live here. If you want cheers for the peace treaty, you can't expect to hear them in Pola."