How could it be possible in any
democracy that voting would be a crime?
1 October 2023, marked six
years since the Catalans voted on a referendum to decide whether or
not they wanted to remain part of Spain. The Spanish state did
everything it could to stop the vote. They deemed it illegal, they
hunted down anyone who might be printing the ballots, or making any
other kinds of preparations, and when it looked like all their
efforts to find the millions of printed ballots had failed, they sent
in 20,000 troops and housed them on large ships in Barcelona harbor,
ships that had Tweety and other cartoon characters painted on the
sides. At first it made them look like fools, but on the day, they
looked like fascists.
On 1 October 2017, these troops
donned their riot gear and dressed in black they went out and beat up
hundreds of unarmed citizens who had gone to polling places to vote.
Young, old, it didn’t matter. Catalans were the enemy. The images
of police in riot gear bludgeoning unarmed people, some elderly,
others with children in tow, were captured on countless photos and
videos and were shown on pretty much every news media around the
world, although it isn’t clear if they saw any of it on Spanish
television.
Afterwards, the New York Times
repeatedly reported on the “botched” referendum, as if the
failure had been because of some sort of incompetence of the
Catalans, and always added that it had been illegal.
The Charter of the United Nations
states that all peoples have a right to self-determination. That is
what the referendum was about. The question it was asking was Voleu
que Catalunya sigui un estat independent en forma de república?
Do you want Catalonia to be an independent state in the form of a
republic? (Note that Spain is not a republic, it is a monarchy.)
People could vote yes or no. Since there had been no agreement with
the Spanish government, the referendum was not binding, so that it
was really only a measure of what Catalan citizens wanted. But even
that was enough to frighten Spaniards.
Over two and a quarter million
people turned out to vote that day, that is, 43 percent of registered
voters turned out in spite of government threats. Slightly more than
92 percent of them voted Yes; and less than 8 percent voted No.
It seemed to me that all those
intellectuals who read The New York Times, The Washington Post, The
Times, the EU, and all the rest of them, would stop to ask themselves
how it could be in a democracy that voting on a referendum would be
illegal? And how could they buy it that peaceful, unarmed people who
were going to drop ballots could be violently attacked by riot police
(they had seen the videos) and then be called terrorists by the
Spanish media and the Spanish government.
There were 1066 reported cases of
victims of police violence on the day of voting – that is, people
who showed up at clinics and hospitals to be treated for wounds. One
man lost an eye when he was hit in the face with a rubber bullet.
Rubber bullets are illegal in Catalonia and Catalan police cannot use
them, but Spanish police are a law unto themselves. To watch them on
the television that day was to see a reincarnation of the German Nazi
bullies who enjoyed hurting people who had no way of defending
themselves.
One thousand four hundred and
thirty-two people have been investigated for criminal acts connected
to the referendum. Not all of them have come to trial, but each one
has had to find legal help and live through the nightmare that
criminal investigation engenders. Although when I looked it up on the
internet, I was told that in Spain, jury trial “is deeply embedded
in its constitutional evolution,” I have lived in Spain for over
twenty years and don’t remember ever hearing of even one jury trial
in the country. As in all trials, the so-called Catalan terrorists
and traitors have been tried by judges. And judges are all appointed
by the government in power, whether that is the Popular Party or the
Socialist Party, both of which are vehemently anti-independence. They
have to be because you can’t win a general Spanish election if you
support Catalonia, much less Catalan independence.
Back to the New York Times. It
was Rafael Minder, their former correspondent from Madrid who
continuously wrote that the referendum was botched – a loaded word.
He has since left the NY Times, hopefully they got rid of him because
of his botched work as a supposedly unbiased and knowledgeable
journalist (I can say that because I am not a journalist, I am a
blogger) but maybe he went on to the greener pastures of the
Financial Times under a bright sun.
When you think that with 20,000
additional police (many of them paramilitary) sent to prevent a
peaceful civilian mobilization of citizens from voting, and yet two
and a quarter million people did vote (on printed ballots that all
the Spanish police never could find ahead of time), the Catalan
referendum was not really botched at all. It was a great success.
Sadly for the Catalans, independence is still off somewhere, beyond
the horizon, but I hope that at some point Americans and others begin
to give them some support. After all, wasn’t it in 1776 that we
Americans won our own independence? It’s not such a new concept.