Xavier Vidal-Folch
SEP 29 2019 – 00:04 CEST
The indepes, 99.99% are pacifists and civilized. Thus, they should not overlook that some of their leaders, such as presidents Carles Puigdemont and Quim Torra, flirt with violent activists. And with non-repentant terrorists. They do it in interviews, tweets and statements.
This osmosis, growing since 2015 – when 24 former members of the terrorist Terra Lliure signed a manifesto pro investiture of Artur Mas -, represents a drastic rupture of the militant sanitary cordon against the violent ones maintained until then by nationalism.
That throw shadows over the separatist movement. Cut sympathies for them. And it seeks a retrospective laundering of violence. The one of low intensity, like the escraches of the CDR, to which Torra encourages to “push” (1/10/2018), perhaps because, solicitous, “All my family is CDR” (12/5 / 2018).
Or the (different) deadly violence. Like the murders committed by the Exèrcit Popular Català / Terra Lliure against the industrialist José María Bultó or the former mayor Joaquín Viola, in 1977, with delayed bombs attached to their bodies with tape.
The prescription for the passage of time or the fulfillment of prison sentences reintegrates their civic rights to the violent. But that does not imply a duty to beat them in the public media, as TV-3 and Catalunya-Ràdio have done in 2015 with the current member of a union and former Terra Lliure Carles Sastre (sentenced to 30 years for murdering Bultó; afer 11 he was out).
Xavier Graset praised him as “great reserve of independence” and Monica Terribas received him as one of “the historical of combative independence”, one of “the companions of Terra Lliure”.
Nobody forces Torra to invite him to the solemn presentation of the House of the Republic (10/30/2018).
Nor does it justify exalting them with “State visits” to the Parliament, as did Carme Forcadell and Puigdemont (5/18/2016) with Arnaldo Otegui (former Herri Batasuna, leader of EH Bildu), or paying homage in a visit from Torra to Euskadi ( 11/7/18), while disregarding the advice of lehendakari Íñigo Urkullu.
Or to receive him – Puigdemont – with all the honors in Waterloo (11/7/2018) or to conspire with him in Switzerland.
Nor to welcome, joyfully, in the House of the Republic, also the founder of Terra Lliure, trained by ETA, Frederic Bentanachs (2/9/2019).
Neither the course of time, nor prison redemption erase democratic historical memory. Neither the dictator’s misdeeds. Neither the murders of the terrorists and their political accomplices.
They are bad companies. Because Sastre opposed the dissolution of Terra Lliure. And Otegui will have redirected the ETAs, but he must still solemnly condemn his crimes. And Bentanachs continues to support violence, but not in the street:
“Violence is framed by the people and when the mark of a whole town is no longer a disturbance, it is a revolutionary fact (…), if the Parliament has to be occupied, one ocuppies it, but you don’t get to hook an adhesive and go out on legs ”, he claims (12/10/2018).
This story is missing a shining protagonist. The lawyer of Puigdemont and Torra, Gonzalo Boye. It deserves more space.
https://elpais.com/politica/2019/09/28/actualidad/1569692255_145626.html
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