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Authors: Giles Tremlett
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national Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory was formed. It tried to stay clear of party politics. It petitioned parliament for help. The petition claimed that up to 30,000 victims of General Franco’s supporters were buried in several hundred mass graves – some in cemeteries and others scattered along roadsides, in woods or open country.
‘The conflict of the two Spains has not finished, nor will it finish until the truth of what happened is restored and the pain suffered , and still endured, by these families is recognised by handing back the bodies so that they can, at last, be given a dignified burial . Those who lost the war were condemned to silence, imposed on them by the dictatorship and agreed on by the democracy in the Amnesty Law of 1977. That condemnation has now reached the third generation of these families … Today there are people who still feel the need to lower their voices or even to close their windows when talking about these events, as if they themselves were doing something clandestine,’ the group said in its parliamentary petition.
The group asked parliament to fund its activities, open up all the military archives, exhume and identify the bodies and bring an end to the ‘discrimination’ against Franco’s victims and their families.
The parliament, where Aznar’s People’s Party held an absolute majority, trod around the subject as if walking on egg shells. Eventually it was agreed that local councils and regional authorities could, if they wanted, set funds aside for exhuming bodies. The same local authorities were ordered, sixty-three years after the war had ended, to avoid ‘reopening old wounds or stirring up the
rescoldo
, the embers, of civil confrontation’. The motion was approved, by consensus, on 20 November 2002– twenty-seven years to the day since General Franco had died.
That a European parliament should, at the turn of the twenty-first century, be passing motions about a war that finished sixty-three years before may seem surprising. That it should include in one of those motions a stern warning about reviving the embers of that confrontation shows that the Civil War still had the power to provoke fear.
The political debate over what to do with the Civil War and its victims continues. A political class which had publicly declared the war to have been overcome has found it impossible to avoid in its own debating chambers. The left found a sudden enthusiasm for the subject when Aznar was in power. It tried, amongst other things, to pass motions that formally recognised the war had been started by an illegal rebellion against the established and elected government. It was an enthusiasm that had been entirely absent when the Socialists were in power in the 1980s and early 1990s.
A significant part of the right continues to insist, however, that the war cannot be blamed on Franco’s side alone. People’s Party spokesmen at parliamentary debates talked of ‘civil confrontation’ and ‘national self-destruction’. Blame, the modern right insists, should be shared by all. Some believe it should be pinned firmly on the left. Right and left, it seems, are forever destined to disagree.
The Socialist government that has now taken over from Aznar has vowed that it will, finally, do something about the mass graves. It is a sign that something is changing. The plans look set, however, to provoke cries of outrage from the right. More than six decades later there are still political arguments to be had – and, presumably, votes won or lost – on the issue of the Civil War. Spain has yet to put that war to sleep.
What about the killers? No one has ever been tried for crimes like the killings at Poyales del Hoyo or Priaranza. Nor can they be. Most of the killers are dead, of course. But some are not.
In an attempt to find one of them, I travelled back to Candeleda . Here, I was told, an infamous Falangist gunman was still alive. His name was Horencio Sánchez,
‘The conflict of the two Spains has not finished, nor will it finish until the truth of what happened is restored and the pain suffered , and still endured, by these families is recognised by handing back the bodies so that they can, at last, be given a dignified burial . Those who lost the war were condemned to silence, imposed on them by the dictatorship and agreed on by the democracy in the Amnesty Law of 1977. That condemnation has now reached the third generation of these families … Today there are people who still feel the need to lower their voices or even to close their windows when talking about these events, as if they themselves were doing something clandestine,’ the group said in its parliamentary petition.
The group asked parliament to fund its activities, open up all the military archives, exhume and identify the bodies and bring an end to the ‘discrimination’ against Franco’s victims and their families.
The parliament, where Aznar’s People’s Party held an absolute majority, trod around the subject as if walking on egg shells. Eventually it was agreed that local councils and regional authorities could, if they wanted, set funds aside for exhuming bodies. The same local authorities were ordered, sixty-three years after the war had ended, to avoid ‘reopening old wounds or stirring up the
rescoldo
, the embers, of civil confrontation’. The motion was approved, by consensus, on 20 November 2002– twenty-seven years to the day since General Franco had died.
That a European parliament should, at the turn of the twenty-first century, be passing motions about a war that finished sixty-three years before may seem surprising. That it should include in one of those motions a stern warning about reviving the embers of that confrontation shows that the Civil War still had the power to provoke fear.
The political debate over what to do with the Civil War and its victims continues. A political class which had publicly declared the war to have been overcome has found it impossible to avoid in its own debating chambers. The left found a sudden enthusiasm for the subject when Aznar was in power. It tried, amongst other things, to pass motions that formally recognised the war had been started by an illegal rebellion against the established and elected government. It was an enthusiasm that had been entirely absent when the Socialists were in power in the 1980s and early 1990s.
A significant part of the right continues to insist, however, that the war cannot be blamed on Franco’s side alone. People’s Party spokesmen at parliamentary debates talked of ‘civil confrontation’ and ‘national self-destruction’. Blame, the modern right insists, should be shared by all. Some believe it should be pinned firmly on the left. Right and left, it seems, are forever destined to disagree.
The Socialist government that has now taken over from Aznar has vowed that it will, finally, do something about the mass graves. It is a sign that something is changing. The plans look set, however, to provoke cries of outrage from the right. More than six decades later there are still political arguments to be had – and, presumably, votes won or lost – on the issue of the Civil War. Spain has yet to put that war to sleep.
What about the killers? No one has ever been tried for crimes like the killings at Poyales del Hoyo or Priaranza. Nor can they be. Most of the killers are dead, of course. But some are not.
In an attempt to find one of them, I travelled back to Candeleda . Here, I was told, an infamous Falangist gunman was still alive. His name was Horencio Sánchez,
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