The Slovene media on Monday reported that a group of some 50 people from the Slovene towns of Nova Gorica, Idrija and Ajdovscina and members of the Slovene minority from the Italian city of Trieste re-erected a stone wall with the inscription 'Our Tito' on the 608-metre hill of Sabotin, north of Nova Gorica.
The 100-metre-long and 25-metre-high wall was initially erected in the 1950s, when Nova Gorica was being built through the so-called work drives launched by the then Yugoslav Communist Party. At the start of the 1990s, the monument was left to decay, and when Slovenia entered the European Union in 2004, the stone blocks were rearranged to form the message 'OUR SLO(venia)'.
The Sabotin Hill was of great military importance in the First World War when the Italians seized it after defeating the then Austrian forces consisting of Croatian and Romanian soldiers.
The monument to Josip Broz Tito, the Communist leader of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, under whose leadership parts of Slovenia and Croatia were given back to those countries (the then Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia) was a matter of dispute between local right-wing and left-wing parties.
The debate about the re-erecting of the monument was rekindled last month when the Italian RAI television aired the said film about the suffering of Italians after the partisans under Tito's leadership took over parts of Slovenia and Croatia which had been under the Italian rule for some time during the Second World War.