TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Law Of Historical Memory Could Dig Up Spain's Past

ADVERTISEMENT

By PAUL HAVEN, The Associated Press

Published: October 28, 2007

Updated: 10/26/2007 08:44 pm

MALAGA, Spain - Juliana Sanchez passes a trembling hand in the air above the cracked and crumbling skeletons in the dry earth at her feet, her eyes moist and her voice quavering.

One of these sets of bones - perhaps this one with tattered leather shoes still attached to its feet, or that skull with bullet damage - is the father she lost 70 years ago, shot by a firing squad loyal to Gen. Francisco Franco in Spain's cataclysmic 1936-1939 Civil War.

'This one could be him,' says Sanchez, gesturing toward a partially unearthed skeleton, its legs pulled up in a near-fetal crouch. 'Or this one, or this. The truth is, they are all my father. That is how I feel.'

For Sanchez and tens of thousands like her, a law likely to be passed by Spain's lower house on Wednesday could make finding the remains of victims of Franco easier, and eventually lead to their names being legally cleared.

But the 'Law of Historical Memory' has sparked a firestorm of debate, with the conservative opposition saying Spain agreed to leave the ghosts of its past buried - in every sense - when it undertook a transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975, and that the bill could tear Spanish society apart.

For Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero - whose grandfather was executed by Franco's forces during the war - the law is a centerpiece of his first term, and with the help of several parties in parliament, its passage looks all but certain. It must then pass the Senate - considered a formality - and be published in the government gazette to become law.

It will mandate that local governments fund efforts to unearth mass graves, and pushes them to make their wartime archives more transparent in order to make searching easier. It also will, for the first time, formally condemn Franco's coup and the nearly 40-year dictatorship that followed, and order the removal of all fascist symbols from the country.

The law will declare the verdicts of wartime summary trials 'illegitimate,' clearing the way for individuals to seek to have the cases thrown out.

War Claimed 500,000 Lives

Although atrocities were committed on all sides during a war that took an estimated 500,000 lives - and the Law of Historical Memory makes reference to all of those killed - it is mostly Franco's victims who still lie in unmarked graves, some holding thousands of bodies. The number of bodies in mass graves nationwide is thought to be in the tens of thousands.

Families on Franco's Nationalist side who lost relatives in the war received preferential treatment, a stipend and proper burial of loved ones.

The conflict, in which the Germans backed conservative Franco and the Soviets backed the leftist Republicans, came to be seen as a dress rehearsal for World War II. So traumatic was the war that even now Spaniards are loath to debate it. Even though the country has been a democracy for three decades, only in recent years have independent groups been looking for unmarked graves such as the one Julia Sanchez came to see.

Conservative former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar says it is not for the government to 'dig up tombs,' and accuses Zapatero's party of being 'obsessed with revenge.'

Angel Acebes, No. 2 in Aznar's Popular Party, says 'Zapatero wants to divide Spaniards and turn them against each other.' He says the prime minister 'wants to remember the worst of our history, the Civil War, and forget the best, which was the transition to democracy and the agreements Spaniards made to live in harmony.'

'You Can't Change History'

The Roman Catholic Church, which largely backed Franco during the war, has also weighed in.

Francisco Perez, the archbishop of Pamplona, said the bill was unnecessary because 'you can't change history,' and urged victims 'to look for ways to forget.'

Today, the Vatican is to beatify some 500 priests killed by Republican forces. Church officials say the timing, three days before the Spanish vote, is coincidental.

Francisco Espinosa Jimenez, the president of the victims' group that has led the effort to recover more than 4,200 bodies buried in the mass grave in Malaga, is outraged, asking: 'How is it that we in Malaga are opening old wounds by doing what we're doing, while the church is not opening old wounds by doing what it is doing?

'We don't want to open old wounds and we don't want a new confrontation in this country,' Espinosa Jimenez said.

'But it is necessary to find out the truth about what happened during the Civil War, something we still haven't done in this country. I don't know anybody who is doing this for revenge. All we want is a dignified burial for our fathers and our grandfathers.'

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT