THE WAY WE ARE

The case of the four im­pris­oned Cata­lan politi­cians and civic lead­ers is, slowly but surely, gar­ner­ing more in­ter­na­tional at­ten­tion. Last month, lawyers work­ing out of Lon­don, Barcelona and Paris - in­clud­ing the pres­ti­gious human rights lawyer Ben Em­mer­son QC - re­ported the pris­on­ers’ plight to the UN Work­ing Group on Ar­bi­trary De­ten­tion, de­scrib­ing the charges of vi­o­lent re­bel­lion and sedi­tion against these de­claredly paci­fist men as ’un­sus­tain­able’. Amnesty In­ter­na­tional has de­manded the im­me­di­ate re­lease of the two civic lead­ers (one of whom was re­cently de­nied his free­dom be­cause ’he main­tains his pro-in­de­pen­dence ideas’ in the words of Pablo Llarena, the Supreme Court mag­is­trate who is deal­ing with the case). He used a sim­i­lar ex­cuse ear­lier in the case of for­mer in­te­rior min­is­ter Joaquim Forn, who has re­nounced all po­lit­i­cal ac­tiv­ity, but not his in­de­pen­den­tist be­liefs). That the world should know that Cata­lan lead­ers are being kept in stir just be­cause they think dif­fer­ently from what Madrid deems ac­cept­able for them to think, is all to the good. But other, less broad­cast things are hap­pen­ing which in­di­cate a deeper and per­haps more dis­turb­ing level of re­pres­sion. To­wards the end of last year, a school­teacher from the town of Tremp, near the Cata­lan Pyre­nees, was ar­rested on a charge of in­cit­ing ha­tred, for hav­ing tweeted wicked, wicked things like ’I don’t be­lieve in God… but do be­lieve in hell: hell is Spain’. In Jan­u­ary of this year, 13 teach­ers from a sec­ondary school in Sant An­dreu de la Barca, near Barcelona, were given a court sum­mons for hav­ing or­gan­ised a Peace Day in which there was some de­bate about the wave of po­lice vi­o­lence dur­ing the Oc­to­ber 1st ref­er­en­dum. Ac­cused of ’in­cite­ment to ha­tred of the Civil Guard’, their cases re­main pend­ing, as do those of scores of other school­teach­ers around Cat­alo­nia, all ar­raigned for the same ’hate crime’ be­cause they’d or­gan­ised sim­i­lar de­bates, often at the be­hest of their stu­dents. Odder still is the ac­cu­sa­tion that the Mayor of Callús, a vil­lage of 2,000 in­hab­i­tants, ’wil­fully dis­obeyed’ the Civil Guard on Oc­to­ber 1st, when there are sev­eral videos that show him try­ing to ask the Civil Guard not to re­sort to vi­o­lence, be­fore one of them whacks him to the ground with his shield (po­lice also seized the Mayor’s com­puter and trashed the local school). But for sheer weird­ness it would be dif­fi­cult to outdo the case of Jordi Perelló, a garage me­chanic in the town of Reus, who last month re­fused to ser­vice a Span­ish po­lice ve­hi­cle, sick­ened as he was by the uni­formed bru­tal­ity he’d wit­nessed on Oc­to­ber 1st; he was given an ex­press sum­mons to court em­a­nat­ing from Madrid, on a charge of, you guessed it, in­cite­ment to ha­tred of the Span­ish po­lice. Al­to­gether, nearly 900 May­ors, teach­ers, co­me­di­ans and civil­ians of all stripes have been ju­di­cially in­ves­ti­gated for hav­ing dared to opine about that day’s of­fi­cially or­ches­trated vi­o­lence. Proof pos­i­tive, it would not be rash to as­sume, that the Span­ish state is not only in de­nial, but that it is well and truly off its au­thor­i­tar­ian trol­ley.