The film is to be broadcast on the occasion of 10 February, which Italy marks as Remembrance Day in tribute to the exodus of 350,000 Italians from Istria, Rijeka, Dalmatia in the wake of the Second World War and 17,000 victims who were killed by being thrown into karst pits known as "fojbe".
Speaking at a news conference in Pula on Friday, Ravnic said that the film, directed by Alberto Negrino and produced by RAI, gave a distorted and fallacious image of the anti-Fascist liberation war in which "Slavs are presented as a genocidal people and Italians as victims of Slavic expansionism".
He said that in every war there were crimes and civilian casualties, but during the anti-Fascist liberation war the casualties in Istria were possible as the consequence of acts of revenge but were in no way the result of organised action.
Ravnic labelled the film as an attempt to revise history so as "to cover up Fascist violence and responsibility".
The Vice-President of the Croatian Anti-Fascist War Veterans' Association, Miljenko Bencic, said the Partisan movement in the country had had no reason to kill innocent people unlike Nazi-Fascism which he said had "crime incorporated its ideology and programme by implementing racial laws and perpetrating genocide against entire ethnic groups".
"We resolutely reject any attempt to equate the accountability of the aggressor and of the victim, which is immoral and unacceptable because Fascism was a criminal ideology while anti-Fascism was the reaction and resistance of the entire democratic freedom-loving world," Bencic said, adding that according to Croatian historians, 284 Fascists had been thrown into pits (fojbe) while Italian sources claimed that the number of victims came to several thousands.
Istrian anti-Fascist war veterans today showed for the first time a BBC-produced film entitled "Fasisticko nasljedje" ("Fascist Legacy") about crimes committed by Italian fascists in Croatia and Slovenia during WW 2.