Italian Premier Romano Prodi voiced indignation on Tuesday after Croatian President Stjepan Mesic accused his Italian counterpart Giorgio Napolitano of racism and revisionism.
"We have been in contact with the Croatian prime minister to express our indignation over these absolutely unjustified words," Prodi said in Calcutta, one of the stages on his official visit to India.
Mesic reacted angrily on Monday to a speech the Italian president made last week during national commemorations for the Foibe atrocities, massacres of Italians in the Istrian peninsula, in modern-day Slovenia and Croatia, at the end of World War II.
Napolitano said the killings were sparked by "feelings of hatred and bloodthirsty fury" and "took on the sinister connotation of ethnic cleansing".
The Croatian leader took specific issue with Napolitano's statement that the atrocities were linked to the "Slavs' plan of annexation" which he said was apparent in the 1947 Peace Treaty between Italy and Yugoslavia.
"It is difficult not to notice the tones of evident racism, historical revisionism and political revanchism" in Napolitano's words, Mesic said.
Commenting from Calcutta on Tuesday, Prodi noted that Mesic's statements followed a period of "great collaboration between Italy and Croatia," highlighted by Rome's firm support for Croatia's bid to join the European Union.
The row took a further turn on Tuesday morning when Foreign Undersecretary Vittorio Craxi announced that his planned visit to Croatia on Wednesday had been cancelled on orders from Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema.
D'Alema summoned the Croatian ambassador to the ministry on Tuesday and told him that Mesic's reaction had been "unmotivated".
A spokesman for the Croatian government in Zagreb confirmed that that Prodi and his Croatian opposite number spoke on the telephone on Tuesday.
The conversation highlighted that it was "in the interests of both governments to develop good relations as neighbours, without any attempts to revise history".
JOINT COMMISSION.
The Croatian government has also proposed a joint historical commission to investigate crimes committed "before, during and after" World War II.
The wording of the statement appeared to indicate that Zagreb wanted to investigate crimes by Italian fascists against Slavs in the run-up to the war as well as the 'foibe' question.
The Foibe are deep gorges in the rocks around the northeastern city of Trieste. Up to 5,000 Italians were thrown into the gorges, dead and alive, during the anti-Fascist uprisings in the area in 1943 and then in 1945 when the area was occupied by Communist forces led by Yugoslav strongman, Marshal Josef Tito.
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.
President Mesic continued his polemics against Napolitano on Tuesday, saying in a radio interview that bringing into question treaties between Italy and Croatia was "absolutely unacceptable".
The foreign ministry in Rome has already said that the president had neither mentioned or referred to the Rome and Osimo accords between the two nations.
The Rome peace treaty, signed immediately after the war, was followed in 1975 by the Osimo treaty, which ended all border questions and other issues which had been left unresolved by the earlier accord.
Asked by a reporter if he would seek a meeting with Napolitano in order to clarify matters, Mesic indicated that such a move was premature at the moment because "you can't understand everything in a day".
DIVISIVE ISSUE.
The Foibe atrocities were until recently a divisive issue in contemporary Italian politics, with right-wing politicians accusing the Left of trying to airbrush the massacres out of history and focusing exclusively on the crimes committed by the Fascist regime.
A number of centre-left politicians now agree that the Foibe massacres constituted a brutal and neglected episode in Italian history.
Others, however, insist the main victims were Fascists and other supporters of Mussolini and the Nazi regime. They also argue that the massacres were the direct result of the violent anti-Italian sentiment created by Fascism's crimes in the region.
In 2005 Italy instituted a Day of Memory on February 10 to commemorate the Foibe atrocities and the tens of thousands of Italians forced out of Istria and Dalmatia when these lands were given over to Yugoslavia after World War II.
