Rastko Schwalba, a Second World War veteran who fought in the Partisan resistance movement, said the main reason of this campaign was the fear of the Italian right of losing power.
He said that it was necessary to reiterate that in the Second World War, Italians and Germans were the aggressors, adding that Italian fascists had never been punished for their crimes, notably for their attempt to commit genocide against Slavs.
Petar Strcic, a historian and member of the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences, said that what was worrisome was the fact that such a film was broadcast by the state-run television RAI, adding that Italian historians, however, gave negative marks to the film.
Strcic said that the Croatian authorities failed to respond to the film in an appropriate way.
He went on to say that figures on dead Italians who were thrown into karst pits known as "foibe" as well as figures on Italians who fled Slovenia and Croatia in the wake of the Second World War were exaggerated. In this context he said that a considerable number of Croats and Slovenes had used this possibility of departure from the then Yugoslavia which was given to ethnic Italians so that they could eventually emigrate to the United States.
Strcic said that Partisans had committed crimes in Slovenia and Croatia, explaining that such things happened in every war.
Participants in the rally remembered the victims of Italian terror in the Rijeka area.
During the 1941-1943 Italian occupation of this part of Croatia, 554 civilians were executed by firing squads, while 9,293 persons were detained in concentration camps and 1,097 of the them died in detention.
The RAI film, directed by Alberto Negrin, dramatises crimes which Partisans committed against Italians leaving Slovenia and Croatia at the end of WW2. RAI showed the film this week on the occasion of Remembrance Day, a new Italian national holiday marked on 10 February in tribute to "foibe" victims and the exodus of Italians from Croatian and Slovene coastal areas in the wake of WW 2.
The Slovene Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday evening that the film could not be a basis for discussions on Slovene-Italian relations.
The Slovene Ministry recalled that 10 February was a date when a peace agreement was signed with Italy in Paris. The ministry went on to say that the current bilateral relations between Slovenia and Italy were good.
Former Slovene Foreign Minister Ivo Vajgl, who is now a foreign affairs adviser to President Janez Drnovsek, was quoted by a local daily as saying that at the diplomatic level nothing particular should be done in response to the film.
Vajgl, who is preparing a possible trilateral meeting of the Croatian, Italian and Slovene presidents, described the film as "a belated attempt at manipulation" by one political group that promoted the film.
Slovene Partisan associations, left-of-centre parliamentary opposition parties and ethnic Slovenes in the Italian city of Trieste insist that Slovenia should officially respond to the film, which they described as an attempt to portray Tito's Slovene and Croatian Partisans as "barbarians". They also said that the film was political manipulation of facts and that it was undermining good-neighbourly relations.