A debate scheduled to take place at
the Rossellini film school in Rome on Italy's Day of Remembrance
of the Foibe massacres Monday was cancelled after a students'
protest.
The debate was also set to be attended by Senator Roberto Menia,
who drafted the 2004 law creating a day to commemorate the mass
killings and deportations of Italians living in the area that
stretches from the Trieste zone in Italy's Friuli Venezia Giulia
region across the Istrian peninsula to Dalmatia in Croatia
during and immediately after WWII.
Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara expressed his
disappointment over the cancellation.
"I hope the event can be reorganized soon", said Valditara,
adding that his ministry will always work to ensure schools
safeguard free speech and confrontation.
The debate had been scheduled on Monday morning at the film-TV
Institute Roberto Rossellini but was scrapped after a protest of
leftwing collective students who wrote on social media that
"remembrance day is the perfect occasion for fascists to get out
of history's swamp and promote a vulgar form of historical
revisionism, trying to make people forget about the crimes
carried out by Fascism during its years in power - let's build
an anti-Fascist wall in every school".
Italy on Monday remembered the massacre of thousands of Italians
by Tito's partisans in ethnic cleansing at the end of WWII.
It is estimated that as many as 15,000 Italians largely, but not
always, identified with Fascism were tortured or killed by
Yugoslav communists who occupied the Istrian peninsula during
the last two years of the war.
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