Italy remembers the Foibe massacres

(ANSA) - ROME, FEB 10 - Italy on Friday marks 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".
    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 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. (ANSA).