Lies, damned lies

When the Oc­to­ber 14 sen­tenc­ing of Cat­alo­nia’s po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers was re­ported in Eng­land, my 92 year-old aunt – who nor­mally has as much con­tact with Cat­alo­nia as I do with the wa­ters of the Limpopo – had no hes­i­ta­tion in qual­i­fy­ing the Supreme Court ver­dict as ’dis­grace­ful’ and ’dread­ful’. As in­deed it was. Under Span­ish law, sex­ual ag­gres­sion car­ries a sen­tence of 1 to 5 years; rape, 6 to 12; rape of a minor, 12-15; kid­nap­ping, 6 to 10; and vol­un­tary homi­cide, 10 to 15. Cat­alo­nia’s vice-pres­i­dent, sev­eral of its min­is­ters, the speaker of the Cata­lan par­lia­ment and two civic lead­ers – all of them non-vi­o­lent peo­ple – have been jailed for be­tween 9 and 13 years, for hav­ing or­gan­ised or sim­ply en­cour­aged a ref­er­en­dum on in­de­pen­dence in which 2,300,000 Cata­lans voted. The sen­tence has been con­demned by the leader of the Bloc Québécois, Canada’s third largest party; by 200 Por­tuguese MPs, writ­ers, jour­nal­ists and artists; by the en­tire Flem­ish par­lia­ment; by the All Party Par­lia­men­tary Group on Cat­alo­nia in West­min­ster; by the pro-democ­racy pro­test­ers in Hong Kong; by Amnesty; and by the speaker of the Ice­landic par­lia­ment. But none of this is enough, by a long chalk, to make Spain’s prime min­is­ter so much as blink let alone think twice. Since the sen­tenc­ing, the re­ac­tion of the Cata­lan pop­u­la­tion – and not uniquely that part of it which de­sires in­de­pen­dence – has been twofold: us oldies go on mas­sive peace­ful demon­stra­tions of over half a mil­lion peo­ple; and the youth go on the streets and dis­rupt rail­ways, air­ports, main roads, bor­ders and at­tack the po­lice when the po­lice at­tack them... which is what young peo­ple, when faced with per­ceived state re­pres­sion, have done since my long-term mem­ory started func­tion­ing at age seven. The three forces of law and order sent out to deal with the pro­test­ers – the mil­i­tarised Civil Guard, the Span­ish Na­tional Po­lice, and the so-called mo­bile brigade of the Cata­lan po­lice – seem, to all in­tents and pur­poses, to have gone rogue. In the week since the ver­dict, young peo­ple all over Cat­alo­nia have been dragged along pave­ments by their hair, beaten into po­lice vans while death threats are shouted at them, or whacked or kicked after hav­ing been forced to the ground. Rub­ber bul­lets – il­le­gal in Cat­alo­nia – have been fired off like paint­balls; four peo­ple have lost an eye and two, a tes­ti­cle; two other peo­ple have se­ri­ous in­tracra­nial in­juries. All of this and much more po­lice bru­tal­ity has been cap­tured on video. And yes, we all know that not all the demon­stra­tors are non-vi­o­lent: some have started fires in the street, some have ripped up paving stones and hurled them at po­lice. But the only recorded in­ci­dent of a po­lice­man being se­ri­ously in­jured by them is sur­rounded by con­fu­sion. The of­fi­cial ver­sion claimed he was hit by a paving stone thrown by demon­stra­tors; but when that was shown to be im­pos­si­ble, given that he was struck from be­hind whereas the pro­test­ers were fac­ing him, the ver­sion changed to it being a local res­i­dent who threw some­thing heavy from an up­stairs win­dow, but a video shows that no pro­jec­tiles came from above; the same video – avail­able on lare­pub­lica.cat – shows a dis­tressed po­lice­men (hands to his head) throw­ing his rub­ber bul­let gun to the floor not long after the in­jured po­lice­man col­lapses, sug­gest­ing that the lat­ter was hit ac­ci­den­tally by ’friendly fire’.

Mean­while, the Span­ish state has shown clearly where it stands: when prime min­is­ter Sánchez came to Barcelona on a brief hos­pi­tal visit, he went to see one in­jured po­lice­man but none of the wounded civil­ians in the same build­ing (Sánchez was booed by the staff). Span­ish po­lice going back to their home towns after ’serv­ing’ in Cat­alo­nia, openly bran­dished Span­ish flags be­fore cheer­ing crowds. And fi­nally, the state pro­pa­ganda de­part­ment known as ’Global Spain’ (whose Eng­lish lan­guage Twit­ter feed has less than 9,000 fol­low­ers) de­cided to de­fend the Supreme Court sen­tences by putting out a puerile an­i­mated film car­i­ca­tur­ing the for­mer Cata­lan vice-pres­i­dent (sen­tenced to 13 years) as a masked vil­lain and in­sist­ing a lit­tle too shrilly that Spain re­ally, re­ally, re­ally is a real democ­racy. It was with­drawn al­most im­me­di­ately, but not fast enough to stop yet more Cata­lans won­der­ing if being Span­ish is worth it. Or even ac­cu­rate.