Italy’s Meloni slams WWII massacre site vandalism

Rome: Italy’s post-fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Saturday slammed vandalism at a politically charged memorial near the Slovenian border to Italian victims of World War II-era massacres.

The monument in Basovizza honours thousands of Italians killed by Yugoslav resistance fighters in the “Foibe massacres”, so-called because victims were often thrown into deep sinkholes known as “foibe”.

“To revile Basovizza, with repugnant inscriptions that recall dramatic pages of our history, is not only to trample on the memory of the martyrs of the Foibe, but to outrage the entire nation,” Meloni said.

It was “an act of unprecedented gravity, which cannot go unpunished,” she said in a statement.

While most of the foibe were sinkholes, the Basovizza Foiba was a mineshaft.

The massacres are a source of contention in Italy. They are commemorated by the far right, which has attempted to equate the mass murders of Italians by Communist-led anti-fascists to the Holocaust.

Serbian phrases scrawled in red on the ground outside the monument overnight between Friday and Saturday read “Death to fascism, freedom to the peoples”, according to Italian media reports.

In the decades after the war, Italy’s attempts to turn the page on its fascist history, and the crimes committed by its own forces in Yugoslavia, meant that the foibe massacres were largely downplayed.

It was only in 2004 that the right-wing government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi initiated a national day of remembrance on February 10.

Meloni’s hard-right government has particularly embraced the event.