A leftist leader's assertion that dictator Benito Mussolini should have been tried instead of summarily executed by partisans in the waning weeks of the Second World War has sparked an outcry in Italy.
Particularly angered by former Premier Massimo D'Alema's opinion today were Italian communists, whose ranks supplied many of the partisans who fought Mussolini's Fascist forces and German Nazi occupiers.
Mussolini and his mistress were shot to death in the northern Italian countryside in April 1945 and their bodies strung up by their heels in a Milan square the next day. Crowds spat at the bodies.
"A trial would have been fairer," D'Alema said in an interview published in Panorama news weekly. He said a Nuremberg-like trial "would have permitted the reconstruction of a piece of Italian history." After the end of the war, Nuremberg, Germany, was the site of an international tribunal on war crimes.
Communists in Italy, who for decades formed a large opposition bloc, were irked by the remarks especially since D'Alema is a former Communist leader. "I find it incomprehensible to maintain today, as D'Alema is doing, that the firing squad execution of Mussolini was an error," the Italian news agency ANSA quoted Gianfranco Pagliarula, a communist party official as saying.
A major partner in Premier Silvio Berlusconi's conservative coalition is National Alliance, a formerly neo-fascist force with roots in the ashes of fascism. Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of the dictator and leader of a tiny party outside the government ranks, called D'Alema's words "important, but late."
She described the execution of her grandfather as "a cowardly and unacceptable act."
AP