China has expressed its "strong indignation" over remarks by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who said this week that communists in China boiled babies for fertilizer.
Italy's Foreign Ministry moved to limit the damage later on Tuesday, releasing a statement in which it said that the premier's words were a reference to "episodes that took place in the past," and stressing that Berlusconi did not intend to stoke tension with China.
The Chinese embassy in Rome released a statement in which it "expressed strong indignation for the unfounded words of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi."
"They accuse me of having said over and over that the communists eat babies. Read The Black Book of Communism and you will discover that in Mao's China, the communists didn't eat babies, but they boiled them to fertilize the fields," Berlusconi said.
He stood by his words on Tuesday.
"I spoke of something from 50 years ago. It's a historical fact. It cannot be denied," Berlusconi said on a TV talkshow in comments carried by the Apcom agency.
The Black Book of Communism is an 846-page history of communism by six academics that was published in 1997.
In a section in which it tells of China's repression against peasants in 1959, the Italian edition of the book states that "the blunders of the repression were terrifying: systematic torture of thousands of detainees, children killed, boiled and then used as fertilizer."
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