Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Saturday criticised "the decades of culpable silence" about the Italians killed by Yugoslav Partisans in karst pits, known as foibe, during and after WWII, Italian news agency Ansa reported.

Speaking at a commemoration at the national memorial to foibe victims in Basovizza near Trieste, Meloni said: “We are here on behalf of the institutions of this republic to once again ask for forgiveness for the culpable silence which for decades enveloped the events on our eastern border.”

Since 2004, Italy has observed 10 February as National Memorial Day for foibe victims and the exodus of Italians from Dalmatia and Istria.

The Italians from Istria, Dalmatia and Rijeka, Meloni said, “in order to remain Italians, decided to abandon everything, houses, property, land and be left with the only thing that Tito’s communists could not take away from them, their identity.”

Yesterday, Italian President Sergio Mattarella also criticised “the wall of silence and oblivion” in Italy about “the horrible suffering of thousands of Italians massacred in foibe or swallowed up in concentration camps.”

In a border area, just several kilometres apart, are the Basovizza Foiba and the “Nazi concentration and extermination camp” Risiera di San Sabba, he said. Most of those killed in that camp were Croatian and Slovenian.

Those are “two symbols of the catastrophe of totalitarianism,” Mattarella said, adding that Risiera di San Sabba was a symbol of “racism and ideological and nationalist fanaticism” and that Basovizza was “one of the places where Tito’s cruelty was manifested against the Italian community.”