Nine Slovenian and Croatian Socialist
MEPs have written to European Parliament President Roberta
Metsola urging her to cancel an exhibition on the Foibe
Massacres opened by Premier Giorgia Meloni's rightwing Brothers
of Italy (FdI) party at the EP building in Strasbourg Monday
saying its content is controversial and misleading.
The Foibe Massacres were perpetrated by Tito's Partisans against
thousands of Italians in Istria and Dalmatia around the end of
WWII.
The MEPs said the show, inaugurated on Foibe Remembrance Day
Monday, showed a "complete contempt for the facts."
They said "the information provided on the board presents an
untrue and extremely damaging portrayal of the recent history of
Slovenia, Italy and Croatia during a period when generations
across Europe endured immense suffering, primarily at the hands
of the fascist regime, which inflicted untold anguish on
millions of people for over two decades."
Most of the Foibe were natural pit-like karst sinkholes
typically found in Friuli Venezia Giulia and the Slovenian part
of Istria into which victims were thrown, sometimes alive.
The most infamous one, the Basovizza Foiba, was a mineshaft.
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.
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.
Many Italians were forced to flee their homes because of the
massacres.
Italy established Foibe Remembrance Day only in 2004, as the
tragedy had been swept under the carpet by anti-Fascists in the
postwar years.
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