Liburnian Autonomist Movement
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The Liburnian Autonomous Movement or the Liburnian Federalist Movement was a political group founded in Rijeka in the summer of 1943, disbanded in the last months of the Second World War. Its most prominent members were killed during the Fiume Autonomists purge.
For centuries the city of Rijeka was a corpus separatum within the Austrian Empire and later the Austro-Hungarian. This is linked to a long political autonomy, which led to the foundation in 1896 of the local namesake party.
Headed by Riccardo Zanella, on 24 April 1921 the autonomists won the parliamentary elections of the newborn Free State of Fiume, but their government was overthrown in March of the following year by the nationalist and pro-fascist group, reunited in the National Block. Zanella was forced into exile together with all his cabinet, later the city was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy following the Treaty of Rome (1924).
The contention for Fiume at the end of the Second World War
The city of Rijeka, one of the focal points of the Adriatic dispute between Italians and Slavs (Slovenians and Croats), was declared annexed to Yugoslavia by a group of Slovenian and Croat Partisans in the Declarations of Pazin of September 13, 1943.
This event, connected to the fall of fascism, gave rise to the resurgence of the autonomist feelings of the Fiuman population. The political heirs of Zanella - at the time exiled in France - regrouped in the Autonomous Movement under the guidance of some of the oldest Autonomist Party members, among whom Mario Blasich had the most authority. Referring to the Treaty of Rapallo (1920) and describing the Free State of Fiume as the first victim of fascist annexation, they again requested the implementation of an autonomous statute for the post-war Fiume. Despite cooperating with the communists during the war in anti-fascist actions, the autonomists considered it impossible to form a political alliance with them.
At the beginning of 1944 a part of the zanelliani faction, mostly made up of younger members, merged into the Italian Autonomous Fiume Movement (FAI), founded by Luigi Polano. Their goal for the city was the restoration of autonomy, similar to that enjoyed at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they advocated armed resistance against the Axis forces (albeit without creating partisan formations), accepting collaboration with the Partisans in order to defend the industrial heritage of the city. This autonomist component was viewed with suspicion by the Partisans, appearing as a possible alternative to annexation of the city to Yugoslavia that the Partisans had in mind, albeit while publicly declaring and promising full autonomy to the local population.
The creation of the Liburnian Autonomist Movement
After the fall of fascism (25 July 1943) other autonomists, mainly former fascist militants, joined the Liburnian Autonomist Movement (Movimento Autonomista Liburnico), led by the engineer Giovanni Rubini. Also believing a formal agreement with the Partisans to be impossible, they planned the transformation of the Fiume region into a federated state.
The autonomists established their own program, which they sent to London, Berlin, Washington, and Rome. The program centered around making Fiume the capital of a state called the "Free Territory of Quarnero", which would include the former Hungarian Littoral, the western part of the Gorski Kotar, a few nearby Slovenian municipalities, the islands of Krk, Rab and Lošinj, and the easternmost part of Istria. All this territory would have been divided into cantons, on the Swiss model. Each canton would have had the right to use the local mother tongue in its area, while the official language of state institutions would have been Italian.
Among the most important exponents of the Movement were Ramiro Antonini, Icilio Bacci, Salvatore Belasic (or Bellasich), Carlo Colussi, Riccardo Gigante, Ruggero Gotthardi, Arturo Maineri, Ettore Rippa, Gino Sirola, Antonio Vio, and Arnaldo Viola. Of these, the Yugoslavs later killed Bacci, Colussi, Gigante, and Sirola.