Tuesday,
February 13, 2007
"Foibe Massacre" Commemoration
Creates Rift with
The
ANNOTICO Report
The
"Foibe" marked the deaths of thousands of Italians who were pulled
from their homes, tortured, shot and thrown into mountain crevasses by
Communist Yugoslav partisans, AFTER
While
reading the following Report, keep in mind the timeline:
Therefore
these Massacres did not happen until AFTER
Also
the reference to "Brutal Italianization” was
similar to the
The
Italianization program encouraged Non Italian residents in areas with
overwhelming Italian residents attend Italian language schools and churches and
speak only the Italian language in PUBLIC. Even Italian Citizenship was offered
to many who accepted.
This
type of distortion is either stupidity or bigotry.
A
particularly interesting aspect of this "disagreement" is that Both Napolitano
and Mesic were/are Communists, and Communists were
basically responsible for the Massacre, and that the Leadership of both Italy
and Yugoslavia, (Croatia, was then part of Yugoslavia), after the war were
Communists, so it was not advantageous for either side to make the
massacre "public", and the story was therefore buried/ ignored.
Commemoration
of WWII massacres by Yugoslav partisans sparks Italy-Croatia dispute
International Herald Tribune
The
Associated Press
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
The dispute has
revived grudges dating back six decades.
It began with
President Giorgio Napolitano's speech on Saturday to mark the deaths of
thousands of Italians who were pulled from their homes, tortured, shot and
thrown into mountain crevasses by Communist Yugoslav partisans during and at
the end of the war. Some victims were thrown sometimes still alive into Alpine crevasses known in local
dialect as "foibe," and the atrocities became known as the foibe
killings.
"There was a
wave of hate and bloody fury, and a Slavic expansionist design ... that took on
the sinister appearance of an ethnic cleansing," Napolitano said.
The response from
Mesic said Tuesday that he
would suggest that
"Then we can
put an end to discussion about World War II," he said.
The comments
prompted
In their meeting,
D'Alema told the ambassador he was "stunned and
pained" by Mesic's words and insisted that there
was no reason for the criticism of the Italian president's speech, according to
ministry officials. They said that the envoy assured D'Alema
he would relay
D'Alema canceled a visit to
Thousands of
Italians were tortured and killed in
Trieste, now part
of Italy, and the Istrian peninsula most of which is now in Croatia came under Italian control after World
War I and they were brutally "Italianized" under Benito Mussolini's
fascists. Official Yugoslav postwar figures showed that about 80,000 Croats,
Serbs and Montenegrins perished during the Italian occupation of Dalmatia and
Memories of that
time prompted the revenge killings as World War II wound down and Yugoslavs
entered the region. Many ordinary citizens were killed and tortured simply for
being Italian or being hostile to annexation by
While not denying
the killings, some Croatians condemn efforts that remember the victims without
addressing the whole history.
"Crimes
committed by Italian fascist soldiers remain fresh in the mind of living
Croatian witnesses, who suffered in war camps, and it is obvious that the
government could not stay silent," said political commentator Zeljko Trkanjec.
For decades, the
foibe massacres did not appear in most of
In
Associated Press
writer Eugene Brcic contributed to this story from
The
ANNOTICO Reports
Can
be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico
Email: annotico@earthlink.net