Post by M. Strubell: Who'll be the first to die in Catalonia?

Post by M. Strubell on the perceived danger of serious violence to curb the Catalan independence process.

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The danger of serious violence

Even before the arrival in September 2017, -without having been asked by Catalonia-, of thousands of Spanish police from the rest of Spain, to be housed in many cases in three Mediterranean cruise ships specially chartered, and others in tourist resort hotels, the possibility of serious incidents against unarmed Catalan citizens has floated in the air.

Indeed many reports say that the October 27 2017 parliamentary resolution declaring Catalonia's independence [in English] was not followed by a call for citizens to surround the Parliament, the seat of the Generalitat (government) or other significant buildings as vast human shields, basically because Spain was sending clear messages to the Catalan authorities that it would shoot to kill if need be.

Sadly, some well-documented chronicles of the Catalan "process" deliberately omit the root cause of the immense mobilisation of whole segments of the Catalan people, sometimes by the million, since July 2010. This is Catalonia's constitutional limbo sparked off by what the distinguished law professor Javier Pérez Royo called the "coup d'état" by the conservative, nationalist People's Party (or PP; at a time when they were in opposition). Readers are invited to search the records to find any previous case of a regional Constitution (or "Statute of autonomy"), after being negotiated by the regional and Spanish Parliaments, and then ratified in a referendum, being taken to Spain's Constitutional Court. This fact and the Court's toothcombing search through each of the several hundred grounds that moved the PP's MPs to challenge the new Statute (that had been designed to apply the Constitution is a proto-federal model that was to put to an end the increasing encroachments on the powers of Catalonia on the back of recentralizing policies), ended up with a nail in the coffin of any hopes of Catalonia finding a comfortable fit: the Constitutional Court judgment of July 2010.  

Since then not a single step, not one, has been taken by any single Spanish government, of which there have been three, to appease the Catalans, to seek solutions, to entice them away from wanting to exercise the right of self-determination and join the growing community of independent nations.

As if to deliberately stir up a hornet's nest, the Spanish authorities instead of seeking a political solution to an eminently political crisis fell back on their devious interpretation of "the law", which has allowed them to enter a spiral of repression of the Catalan independence movement. Hardly anywhere have voices been heard, in the wilderness of Spain's central plateau, to say that the solution is not repression, which only aggravates affairs. 

Right now there are ten Catalan political and social leaders in pre-trial detention on ludicrous trumped-up charges, and their appeals to the Spanish courts for protection - in the face of the breaches of their fundamental rights - being simply put away in a drawer instead of being given priority attention. There are half a dozen more in exile, in Belgium, Scotland and Switzerland.

This spring the People's Party government finally toppled into its quagmire of corruption cases. There were those that hoped that the new Socialist government would adopt a more pragmatic, political approach to the huge problem facing them, even though they fully endorsed the draconian measures adopted by the Spanish Government with the support, on October 27, of the Senate, which were feebly claimed to be allowed under article 155 of the very Constitution that has not been respected since the disastrous 2010 Judgment.

There have been hundreds of well-attested cases of Spanish ultranationalist violence. Who will be the first to die?

...ooo000ooo...

See also article by José María Macías Castaño.
https://www.elespanol.com/opinion/tribunas/20181212/primer-muerto-cataluna/360083991_12.amp.html