Dragon’s den

Most of us here in Cat­alo­nia, our pro-in­de­pen­dence politi­cians in­cluded, never ex­pected a semi-legal ref­er­en­dum (it was legal in Cat­alo­nia, but ’sus­pended’, not il­le­galised, by Spain’s con­sti­tu­tional court) to be met first with a wave of po­lice vi­o­lence against Eu­ro­pean cit­i­zens not seen in Eu­rope for at least four decades (1,066 civil­ians in­jured in a hand­ful of hours). Nei­ther did they ex­pect that Spain’s courts would go into ju­di­cial overkill, hand­cuff­ing and im­pris­on­ing two paci­fist civic lead­ers, a de­mo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected Cata­lan vice-pres­i­dent and seven min­is­ters ditto in­def­i­nitely with­out bail on charges of vi­o­lent re­bel­lion (for which the hack­neyed phrase ’trumped up’ would be a gross un­der­state­ment). And even less did they ex­pect that on Oc­to­ber 10th last (ac­cord­ing to three po­lice sources who talked to In­terviú mag­a­zine) Span­ish law en­force­ment agen­cies would draw up a plan to as­sault the Cata­lan par­lia­ment using hun­dreds of elite forces leap­ing from he­li­copters, charg­ing in at ground level, and creep­ing out of the sewage sys­tem, in the event that the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment de­cided to block­ade the build­ing (it didn’t: some min­is­ters stayed to be jailed, and oth­ers, plus the pres­i­dent, went into exile in Brus­sels to in­ter­na­tion­alise the con­flict). Nei­ther did any­one ex­pect the Span­ish king - who was given a per­fect op­por­tu­nity to calm things down, apol­o­gise for all the biff­ing and hair-drag­ging, and sug­gest ne­go­ti­a­tions - to make a speech in which he showed that he was lit­tle more than a snarling pro­pa­gan­dist for Spain’s rul­ing Pop­u­lar Party. Even less did any­one ex­pect that the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of this same party would lie through their den­tures to the in­ter­na­tional press, claim­ing that im­ages of po­lice bru­tal­ity filmed by that same press were ’fake’. And we cer­tainly didn’t think that the ap­pli­ca­tion of ar­ti­cle 155 of the con­sti­tu­tion, which al­lows cen­tral gov­ern­ment to take tem­po­rary con­trol of any way­ward au­tonomous re­gion, to be­come an ugly witch hunt (which, by the way, was sup­posed to last a min­i­mum of six months – by which time any­thing that so much as whiffed of Cata­lanism would’ve been banned, fined or jailed into obliv­ion - but it seems that Mr Tusk obliged Madrid to call the snap elec­tion which will take place in Cat­alo­nia on De­cem­ber 21st). Not long ago a Cata­lan lan­guage writer nut­shelled our sit­u­a­tion thus: ’We are fac­ing a mon­ster’. Cat­alo­nia’s na­tional saint may be Jordi the dragon slayer, but right now we don’t have so much as a sin­gle lance to hand. Which is why many peo­ple feel con­fused, pow­er­less, afraid and fu­ri­ous. All we have, once again, is a chance to vote . And we’re going to take it.