Rome - Prime Minister Janez Janša and Cardinal Franc Rode featured as witnesses in a documentary on summary executions in the wake of Second World War that was aired on Rai 2, the second channel of the Italian public broadcaster, on Saturday night.

The documentary, entitled Foibe ed esodi, i giorni dell'Odio (Foibe and Exodus, Days of Hatred) has been made by journalist Andrea Romoli. It premiered on Rai 2 just before midnight on Saturday with a rerun on Sunday morning.

Janko Petrovec, the Rome correspondent for the Slovenian public broadcaster RTV Slovenija, who saw the film, has described it as "an Italian view of the history of 20th century dictatorships in the North Adriatic".

Speaking for Radio Slovenija, Petrovec said the documentary was not only about the post-war suffering of Italians but also about the "three decades of persecution and violence against the peoples living between Gorizia and Dalmatia".

In the part where he talks of hundreds of innocent Italian post-war victims the author does not get into the dispute about the actual number of victims of 'foibe', the Italian for karst pits in which the Communists threw their victims after WWII, said Petrovec.

In the film Janša shares the story of his father, who had to dig his own grave under the Fascists, was interned in the Dachau camp under the Nazis and after the war was taken by the Yugoslav secret police to the woods of Kočevski Rog to be shot but managed to escape.

In the documentary Janša says that in Slovenia, Communists were responsible for many more victims than the Nazis or Fascists.

Cardinal Rode, the former archbishop of Ljubljana, talks in the documentary of his exile in Argentina and of the persecution of the Slovenian clergy in the decade after WWII.

Another Slovenian to appear in the documentary is Tit Turnšek, a former ambassador and former head of the WWII Veterans' Association, who speaks about expulsion of Germans from Slovenia.