Rome - The Italian government's decision to postpone the release of a new postage stamp commemorating Italy's Fascist-era rule over the Croatian port city of Rijeka has drawn criticism from politicians and representatives of ethnic Italians who fled Communist Yugoslavia. Italian newspapers said Wednesday that Rome's decision came at the behest of the Croatian authorities who are eager to avoid inflaming ultra-nationalist sentiments in Croatia ahead of next month's elections.
Some three-million copies of the stamp showing Rijeka's Maritime Museum, but which served as the seat of government during Italy's 1924-44 dominion of the Adriatic port, then known as Fiume, were scheduled for release Tuesday.
The phrase: "Fiume - Eastern land, once Italian" was also set to appear on the 65 euro-cent stamp.
However, hours before the stamps' release, the postal services citing an order from the Communications Ministry said they would be issued at a "more opportune moment."
"The stamps are not being blocked, they will be released on December 10," Communications Ministry chief spokesman Sergio Bruno told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Officials have not confirmed or denied whether the decision was linked to a request by Zagreb ahead of the Croatian vote.
But Mario Landolfi, a former communications minister in Silvio Berlusconi's conservative government which in 2005 approved the stamp's design, branded the decision as "despicable."
It amounted to an affront to the "60,000 inhabitants of Fiume, 54,000 of whom ended up as exiles because of their love for Italy," Landolfi, currently a parliamentarian for the right-wing National Alliance, said.
Italy has long demanded compensation, first from Yugoslavia, which annexed Rijeka in 1945, and since 1991 from Croatia, for the assets seized from ethnic Italians it says were driven out of the territory.
Rome has also indicated it would make its final approval for Croatia's bid to join the European Union conditional on a resolution of the dispute.
"A few millimetres of paper has re-awakened the inferiority complex of the most backward of Croats on the eve of the elections," said Lucio Toth who heads ANVGD, a group representing Italian exiles from the former Yugoslavia.
Still, the decision to hold back on the stamp's release may help prevent a row similar to the one that broke out between Rome and Zagreb in February.
Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema then cancelled an official visit to Croatia following an angry exchange over the massacre of thousands of Italians during World War II by communists in the Istrian peninsula, now part of Croatia and Slovenia.
Earlier Croatian President Stjepan Mesic had accused his Italian counterpart Giorgio Napolitano of "open racism" for a speech by Italy's head of state in which he described the murders as "ethnic cleansing."
