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