To understand the underlying animosity regarding Fiume/Rijeka, one must know a little about it's history.

The earliest settlements on the site were Celtic Tarsatica (modern Trsat, now part of Rijeka) on a hill and the tribe of mariners, the Liburni in the natural harbor below. The city long retained this double character.

In the time of Augustus, the Romans rebuilt Tarsatica as a municipium on the right bank of the small river Rjecina (whose name simply means "river") as Flumen. . After the 4th century the city was rededicated as Flumen Sancti Viti, the city's patron saint.

From the 5th century onwards, the town came under successive Frankish, Croatian and Magyar rule before coming under the control of the Austrian Habsburgs in 1466 .

Created a free port in 1723, Fiume was passed during the 18th and 19th centuries among the Habsburgs' Austrian, Croatian, and Hungarian possessions until its attachment to the latter kingdom for the third and last time in 1870. Although Croatia had a constitutional autonomy within Hungary, the City of Fiume was independent, governed directly from Budapest by an appointed governor, as Hungary's only international port. There was competition between Austria's Port of Trieste and Hungary's Port of Fiume.

The future mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia, lived in the city of Fiume, at the turn of the 20th century, and reportedly even played football for the local sports club.

Habsburg-ruled Austria-Hungary's defeat and disintegration in the closing weeks of World War I led to the establishment of rival Italian and Croatian administrations in the city as both Italy and the founders of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) claimed sovereignty based on their "irredentist" ("unredeemed") ethnic populations.

At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Italy based her claim on the fact that Italians were the largest single nationality within the city. Croats made up most of the remainder, and were also a majority in the surrounding area, including the neighbouring town of Susak. Negotiations were rudely interrupted by the city's seizure on September 12, 1919 by a force of Italian nationalist irregulars led by the writer Gabriele d'Annunzio, who eventually established a state, the Italian Regency of Carnaro. This happened just two days after the Treaty of Saint-Germain was signed that declared the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy dissolved.

On November 12,1920, Italy and Yugoslavia concluded the Treaty of Rapallo, under which Fiume/Rijeka was to be an independent state, the Free State of Fiume/Rijeka, under a regime acceptable to both.

D'Annunzio's response was characteristically flamboyant and of doubtful judgment: his declaration of war against Italy invited the bombardment by Italian royal forces which led to his surrender of the city at the end of the year. Italian troops took over in January 1921. A period of diplomatic acrimony closed with the Treaty of Rome (January 27, 1924), which assigned Fiume to Italy and Susak to Yugoslavia, with joint port administration. Formal Italian annexation (March 16, 1924) inaugurated twenty years of Italian rule and a policy of Italianization of the Croatian population.

The aftermath of World War II saw the city's fate again resolved by a combination of force and diplomacy. This time, Tito's Communist Yugoslav troops advanced (early May 1945) as far west as Trieste in their campaign against the German occupiers of both countries: Fiume became the Croatian city of Rijeka, a situation formalized by the Paris peace treaty between Italy and the wartime Allies on February 10, 1947.

Once the change in sovereignty was formalized, Italian speakers fled the city in advance of Tito's Communist savage regime and went into exile (Esuli). The discrimination most of them experienced and the persecution many of them suffered at the hands of the new Yugoslav authorities in the dying days of World War Two and the first weeks of peace were a painful memory for them. Summary executions of hundreds of suspected 'Fascists', Italian public servants, military and just ordinary citizens pushed Fiume's Italians to abandon their ancestral home.

More than 350,000 Italians were forced to abandon their homes between 1947 and 1954 to flee Tito's ethnic cleansing, in which more than 20,000 ethnic Italians were systematically pulled out of their beds in the middle of the night, tied together and hurled to their deaths into deep crevasses in the Istrian limestone, known as "Foibes".

The horrendous memories still echo loudly.

http://www.istrianet.org/istria/property/news/sundaytelegraph990815.htm

It also seems that the Postal Stamp has a "deeper" significance that casual eye would be unaware.

SEE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postage_stamps_and_postal_history_of_Fiume

Italy Postpones Postage Stamp of Croatian city

Europe World News October 31, 2007

Rome - The Italian government's decision to postpone the release of a new postage stamp commemorating Italy's Fascist-era rule over the Croatian port city of Rijeka has drawn criticism from politicians and representatives of ethnic Italians who fled Communist Yugoslavia. Italian newspapers said Wednesday that Rome's decision came at the behest of the Croatian authorities who are eager to avoid inflaming ultra-nationalist sentiments in Croatia ahead of next month's elections.

Some three-million copies of the stamp showing Rijeka's Maritime Museum, but which served as the seat of government during Italy's 1924-44 dominion of the Adriatic port, then known as Fiume, were scheduled for release Tuesday.

The phrase: "Fiume - Eastern land, once Italian" was also set to appear on the 65 euro-cent stamp.

However, hours before the stamps' release, the postal services citing an order from the Communications Ministry said they would be issued at a "more opportune moment."

"The stamps are not being blocked, they will be released on December 10," Communications Ministry chief spokesman Sergio Bruno told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Officials have not confirmed or denied whether the decision was linked to a request by Zagreb ahead of the Croatian vote.

But Mario Landolfi, a former communications minister in Silvio Berlusconi's conservative government which in 2005 approved the stamp's design, branded the decision as "despicable."

It amounted to an affront to the "60,000 inhabitants of Fiume, 54,000 of whom ended up as exiles because of their love for Italy," Landolfi, currently a parliamentarian for the right-wing National Alliance, said.

Italy has long demanded compensation, first from Yugoslavia, which annexed Rijeka in 1945, and since 1991 from Croatia, for the assets seized from ethnic Italians it says were driven out of the territory.

Rome has also indicated it would make its final approval for Croatia's bid to join the European Union conditional on a resolution of the dispute.

"A few millimetres of paper has re-awakened the inferiority complex of the most backward of Croats on the eve of the elections," said Lucio Toth who heads ANVGD, a group representing Italian exiles from the former Yugoslavia.

Still, the decision to hold back on the stamp's release may help prevent a row similar to the one that broke out between Rome and Zagreb in February.

Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema then cancelled an official visit to Croatia following an angry exchange over the massacre of thousands of Italians during World War II by communists in the Istrian peninsula, now part of Croatia and Slovenia.

Earlier Croatian President Stjepan Mesic had accused his Italian counterpart Giorgio Napolitano of "open racism" for a speech by Italy's head of state in which he described the murders as "ethnic cleansing."

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/133874.html