FdI thanks Veneto Skinheads for support in Foibe remembrance

(ANSA) - ROME, FEB 20 - A Veneto chapter of Premier Giorgia Meloni's right-wing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party came under fire from the opposition on Tuesday after it thanked local extreme right groups for their support in recent commemorations of the Foibe massacres during and after WWII.
    Centre-left Democratic Party (PD) representatives described as "aberrant" the Facebook post published by the Cadoneghe FdI chapter thanking "Ideal Continuity and Veneto Fronte Skinheads for their collaboration and ever precious presence" in institutional events to mark the national day of remembrance on February 10 of the mass killings by Yugoslav Partisans of Italians living in the area that stretches from the Trieste area in Italy's Friuli Venezia Giulia region across the Istrian peninsula to Dalmatia in Croatia after the armistice in September 1943.
    "It is a blatant sign of an undoubtedly fraternal agreement between the militants of Giorgia Meloni's party and this fringe group with a clear neo-Nazi, racist and anti-Semitic matrix," said Vanessa Camani and Andrea Zanoni of the PD.
    "In the knowledge that we must always keep up our guard against these regurgitations, it is no coincidence that we requested and obtained new funding for the law against fascism during the last budget session," they added.
    Foibe are natural pit-like karst sinkholes typically found in Friuli Venezia Giulia and the Slovenian part of Istria into which victims were thrown, sometimes alive.
    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 Italy established Foibe Remembrance Day only in 2004, as the tragedy had been swept under the carpet by anti-Fascists in the postwar years.
    Remembrance of the Foibe massacres has found new impetus under the Meloni's right-centre government, which at the end of January approved the creation of a dedicated museum on the proposal of the premier herself and Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano. (ANSA).