«Remember these persecuted people! Put them in a position to work and live in family tranquillity. Italy must offer a tangible contribution of its millennial civilization to these unhappy creatures with her fraternal hospitality ». On December 4, 1923, Luigi Luzzatti, whose ninetieth anniversary of his death falls this year, accompanied the head of a delegation of the Armenian people with these words to the Italian Prime Minister, Benito Mussolini.
Luzzatti, now out of parliamentary and governmental activity – since 1922 most of Italian political activity had lost its autonomy having been concentrated by fascism in the hands of the Prime Minister – nonetheless finds the possibility of carrying out his political "mission"; outside an increasingly narrow fence of Italian politics he can dedicate himself to oppressed peoples.
In those years the genocide of the Armenian people that began in 1915 was still ongoing, when, with the arrest of over two thousand Armenians - politicians, intellectuals, merchants, journalists and students - the Ottoman Empire began the first genocide of the twentieth century. A wound - over 2.500.000 dead - deep and open, with respect to which there is still no sharing.
For Turkey, officially, there has never been a genocide and the number of victims of those "facts", less than 200 units, is considered the result of the legitimate and dutiful response to an armed insurrection that endangered security of the country.
Today we are living in difficult days in which the freedom and security of peoples are subjected to a dangerous and constant attack and the drama of immigration, from whichever angle we read it from, deeply shakes our consciences. Luzzatti's work, to the most unknown, in defense of oppressed peoples and his intense activity of raising awareness of governments and international organizations, are more relevant than ever.
He dedicated himself both to reviving the hope of freedom among the Armenian people and to attracting Italian attention - to him we owe the hospitality of the Armenians in Southern Italy - and international attention to the need for political morality, against the disengagement of the great powers starting with the absence of diplomatic action which, together with the lack of unity of action between Great Britain and Russia, had allowed the Turks to continue the mass extermination of the Armenian people.
Luzzatti, born into a Jewish family, could not remain indifferent to the oppression of peoples, he felt the duty of a father towards all the orphans of the Earth.
On March 2, 1924, Willonghby H. Dickinson, one of the Vice Presidents of the Union of Associations for the League of Nations, came to Italy to shake Italian distrust of the League of Nations and said to Luigi Luzzatti “The Italian don' don't feel the use of it”. The Italian statesman did not deny but pointed out that minorities had never been so trampled upon as after the establishment of the League of Nations and that this should have immediately stopped the massacre of the Armenians and the consequent dispersion of that people.
Anti-Semitism was also reawakening in freer countries, such as Poland and, evidently, the League of Nations did not fulfill its task, the voice of minorities did not usefully reach it.
“Why – Luzzatti asked – does England, which is the most important member of the League of Nations, not take up these apostolates with the strength of its means and its prestige? With her authority England could and should have found a home for the Armenians”.
A few years later history, also due to this guilty inertia, with the other great genocide, that of the Jewish people by the Nazi-fascist forces, dramatically proved Luzzatti right. Also in this juncture, as always in his life, Luzzatti was able to keep political activity together, in this case diplomatic activity, from the concreteness of doing.
In Bari, in those years, he began to take care of the Armenians who had fled to the Apulian city, introducing them to one of the activities most suited to them, that of the production of carpets for the benefit of the colony itself, to avoid forcing them to return to the Sardarabad steppe. Also in Bari he had numerous meetings with the Armenian writer and poet, Hrand Nazariantz, the man of letters Jenovk Armen, whom he brought together with important and influential personalities.
He obtained a technical commission for the Caucasus, for Soviet Armenia, with the aim of examining the territory assigned to 50 Armenians refugees in Greece, to ascertain that there were conditions for a decent material life before sending those unfortunate people there.
In Milan he laid the foundations of an anonymous company that dealt with the sale of Armenian carpets produced in the village of Nor Arax. He tried and partially succeeded in repairing the betrayal inflicted by the international community's moral and political insensitivity towards an entire people.
Once again, even in international matters, Luzzatti was able to anticipate the times. Once again, all the farsightedness and the impressive topicality of his thought and work provide us with useful keys to understanding the present and the future.
* Giuseppe De Lucia Lumeno is the Secretary General of the National Association of Popular Banks
