LANGUAGE, LANGUAGE

1Last month’s brief return of Catalonia’s former president Carles Puigdemont to his native land, his even briefer speech and his subsequent vanishing act was in every paper and news medium around the world, from the BBC and the New York Times to little Finland’s Helsingen Sanomat. With few exceptions, however, these media resorted to their usual prejudices when trying to contextualise both him and the referendum on independence which his government organised on October 1st, 2017. For instance, according to the Guardian – the least parochial and closed-minded of the UK’s dailies, which isn’t saying much – Puigdemont ’has been living in self-imposed exile in Belgium after fleeing Spain to avoid arrest for masterminding an illegal independence referendum’. ’Illegal’?. In 2010, the Spanish Constitution specifically allowed Town Councils and autonomous governments to hold popular consultations, including both surveys and debates but also ’referendums in connection with any aspect of public life’. ’Any aspect’ obviously includes the right to vote on the question of independence. When, in 2015, a pro-referendum majority was voted into the Catalan Parliament (a sovereign political entity), Spain’s Constitutional Tribunal provisionally suspended the holding of the referendum but did not illegalise it formally until a week after 2.3 million people had voted in it. ’Masterminded’? Puigdemont did not ’mastermind’ anything on his own. The referendum was announced clearly in his party’s manifesto and its organisers included hundreds of people: mayors, members of cultural and civic associations, plus Catalan ministers from the left-leaning Esquerra Republicana party, which worked in tandem with Puigdemont, as did the far left CUP party. ’Fleeing Spain’? ’Self-imposed exile’? Being the Catalan president, Puigdemont was the primary scapegoat for the Spanish judiciary, who accused him of sedition, a moth-eaten crime (it appeared on the statute books in 1822) which was defined by any attempt to upset the peace through lawless means. This concept does not exist in the laws of any other European country, which require proof of armed violence against the state before anything close to sedition can be charged (the only violence which occurred due to the referendum came from Spanish law enforcement, in spades). As for ’self-imposed exile’, it should be remembered that the Catalan government and two members of civic organisations agreed to divide themselves into those who would go abroad and those who would go to jail. Of all of them, Puigdemont was the one who was going to face the harshest punishment: a possible 20 year sentence. I wonder if the journalists at the Guardian (or any other paper) would consider their journey to another country to be ’self-imposed’, given similar conditions.

Puigdemont came back to Catalonia on August 8th and made a speech on the day and time that it had been announced he would, then managed to disappear and turn up the following day at his working home in Belgium, despite the Catalan police having put out a level three search alert (the one used for terrorist attacks) which caused a total of 39 kilometres of tailbacks across the country. In one fell swoop, he put the Catalan cause back on the international map, highlighted the fact that the groups most opposed to everything he stands for are the PP and Vox (the right-to-far-right) and the judiciary (ditto), and won even more respect than before from large chunks of the Catalan public for having cocked a snook at a democratically flawed, not-much-loved state through an act that required a considerable amount of personal courage. And also for reminding those of us who believe in the need for independence that, as he put it, ’we’re still here’.

Opinion