Italy on Friday marked the Day of
Remembrance of the Foibe, the massacre of the thousands of
Italians by Tito's partisans in ethnic cleansing at the end of
World War II.
"Today, Italy marks the Day of Remembrance and pays its tribute
to the martyrs of the Foibe and to the Italians who were forced
to abandon their homes just because they were Italian," Premier
Giorgia Meloni said.
"Hundreds of thousands of our compatriots who were forced to
flee and whom the nation did not know how to welcome as it
should have done".
President Sergio Mattarella said "Foibe Remembrance Day
preserves and renews the memory of the tragedy".
The 'Foibe' mass killings took place mainly in Friuli-Venezia
Giulia, Istria and Dalmatia during and after World War II
against the local Italian population.
Foibe are narrow Carsic pits or gorges into which victims were
thrown, sometimes alive.
It is estimated that as many as 15,000 Italians were tortured or
killed by Yugoslav communists who occupied the Istrian peninsula
during the last two years of the war.
Many of the victims were thrown into the narrow mountain gorges
during anti-Fascist uprisings in the area and the exact number
of victims of these atrocities is unknown, in part because
Tito's forces destroyed local population records to cover up
their crimes.
Foibe Remembrance Day was not set up until 2004, as the tragedy
had been swept under the carpet by anti-Fascists in the postwar
years.
"The memory of the Foibe and the Giuliano-Dalmatian exodus was
for too many years the victim of a real conspiracy of silence,"
Meloni said.
Mattarella echoed this saying "there is a load of pain and blood
that was removed for years" and "no one must be afraid of the
truth".
He said "there are no risks from the circulation of ideas, but
from indifference".
However, Maurizio Acerbo, the leader of the Communist
Refoundation Party, said the Foibe was a "fascist invention".
He said the government and the centre-left opposition "repeat a
unilateral, distorted and often literally made-up version of
history like parrots".
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