Obama’s dreadful
error about the
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Islay’s Scotland
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Today’s banner
Early Spring flowers
in Angus
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Why the Spanish
civil war
still goes on
Bob Cant
On the same day that Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson, both renowned as conciliators in international conflicts, reminded the world of the importance of upholding human rights law, the Spanish Supreme Court decided not to take action against the judge, Baltasar Garzon, for prosecuting people for war crimes during the Spanish civil war. Maybe, the message about human rights abuses in times of war was getting through.
Or maybe not. While the court recognised that in other countries, such as Argentina, prosecutions could be pursued about past dictatorships, they declared it was not possible to do that in Spain once the protagonists were dead. The investigations that Garzon wanted to pursue were best left, the judges agreed, to historians. The law of amnesty, passed in 1977, shortly after Franco’s death, could not be superseded by more recent human rights legislation. The judges had emerged long enough from the bubble of the Spanish judicial system to realise that the world was watching them and then retreated back inside to convince themselves that being watched by organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch was not as significant as their own internal shenanigans.
There is, of course, a good rational case to be made about the difficulties of prosecuting the dead for crimes that they may or may not have committed. But one of the problems in Spain, as the court acknowledged, was the unequal treatment between Franco’s dead and the republican dead. Many of Franco’s dead are buried in the Valley of the Fallen, an enormous basilica that contains his tomb, and every year on the anniversary of his death his daughter and several hundred diehard followers assemble to remember the man whom they regard as the saviour of Spain.
On the other hand, over 100,000 republican dead lie in unmarked graves and ditches across the country. Many of the members of their families who suffered bitterly during the post-war period would like the opportunity to find their dead, to bury them and to commemorate their lives and deaths in public. Many of those who support Garzon want not so much their day in court as their day in a public cemetery.
The Supreme Court’s decision to acquit Garzon of perverting the course of justice for the way in which he pursued the crimes of the Franco era is, we should be clear, extremely disingenuous. It was only recently that the court agreed to disqualify him for a period of 11 years for instigating wire tapping against people believed to be involved in corruption. Javier Gomez Bermudez, a right-wing judge and no friend of Garzon, even went so far as to ask why there was such a rush to confirm the disqualification. Garzon may have been cleared of the charge of pursuing crimes in relation to the Franco regime but the rushed decision made it clear that he will not be able to resume any such investigation until 2023 when he will be 67. By that time all the survivors of the war will be dead.
How do societies which have undergone civil wars find ways of coming
to terms with their losses and their own behaviour and moving on in a
way that is healing?
Spain never underwent any process of reconciliation, along the lines of the one organised by Desmond Tutu after the collapse of apartheid. There has never been any opportunity for people from either side in the civil war to come forward and be witness to the atrocities that they either saw or took part in. The wounds are still not healed and decisions like those of the Supreme Court this week will keep them open and festering.
In 1938, Azana, the president of the Spanish republic, said: ‘It is a moral obligation, above all for those who suffer war, when it ends as we hope it will end, to draw from its lesson and its warning the greatest benefit possible. And when the torch passes to other hands, to other men, to other generations, may they remember, if some day their blood boils with anger and once more the Spanish temper is infuriated with intolerance and with hate and with the appetite for destruction, let them think of the dead’. It is good advice to think of remembering the dead but sadly, it is the case that because this advice was offered by a republican it is likely to be ignored by non-republicans.
If we look at Garzon’s attempts to bring the behaviour of the Franco regime into a legal context, we can see that it raises questions of a much more general nature about the resolution of war conflicts. How do societies which have undergone civil wars find ways of coming to terms with their losses and their own behaviour and moving on in a way that is healing? It is not satisfactory for one side to declare an end to the grief while the other side and their descendants are still in a state of shock or suppression.
As Tutu said in relation to all those who had survived the apartheid regime: ‘We are connected with the generations that have gone before as we are connected with the generations that come. We are connected in the things in which we glory while we are connected in the things of which we are ashamed and we can’t pretend there is not that connection’.
Connecting with enemies, former enemies and the children of enemies is not easy. The fact that Garzon has been removed from the process (although he may well be able to pursue a career in the field of international human rights) means that Spain has missed a chance to engage with the wounds of a murderous war. The way in which Garzon was treated makes it less likely that any other Spanish judge will take up the cause of their unburied dead. The civil war will continue.
Bob Cant is the editor of ‘Footsteps and Witnesses: Lesbian and gay lifestories from Scotland’
