Croatia criticizes EU over dispute with Italy

Croatia criticizes EU over dispute with Italy

Napolitano described the killings as "a wave of hate and bloody fury, and a Slavic expansionist design."

Mesićresponded by saying the speech contained "traces of open racism, historical revisionism and political revanchism."

The EU appeared to side with member country Italy on Wednesday after European Commission spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen said the "language used by the Croatian president was inappropriate, or seemed inappropriate."

She did not comment on Napolitano's speech.

At a press conference on Thursday, Croatian Premier Sanader accused Ahkrenkilde Hansen's statements of being "profoundly one-sided and unacceptable."

Sanader added that the EU was "likely not substantially informed about the whole facts," and that his government would brief Brussels on the full background surrounding the dispute.

The spat between the two otherwise friendly Adriatic neighbors has revived grudges dating back six decades.

It began on Saturday when Napolitano paid homage to thousands of Italians who were tortured and buried in mountain crevasses by Yugoslav anti-fascist forces during and at the end of the war. Some victims were thrown — sometimes still alive — into Alpine pits known in local dialect as "foibe," and the atrocities became known as the foibe killings.

While not denying the killings, Mesićcondemned efforts to remember the victims without addressing the whole history — or more importantly, the massacres of Croatians and other Slavs that preceded it.

Trieste, now part of Italy, and the Istrian peninsula — most of which is now in Croatia — came under Italian control after World War I and they were brutally "Italianized" under Benito Mussolini's fascists.

Official Yugoslav postwar figures showed that about 80,000 Croats, Slovenes, Serbs and Montenegrins perished during the Italian occupation of Dalmatia and Montenegro in 1941-43.