Antonio Fernández. Barcelona
06/23/2019 21:18 – Updated: 06/23/2019 23:33
To carry out the referendum of October 1, the three major parties of Catalonia shared the tasks of organizing it. A senior leader of the CUP who prefers to remain anonymous explains to El Confidencial that the future strategy of the Catalan independence movement “goes on the same line of 1-O. We must work from the difference. That is what has been talked about in the top of our organization and this is what we have to let Quim Torra know”. The phrase of the Òmnium Cultural president, Jordi Cuixart, at the end of the trial, “we will do it again”, repeated later by the ‘president’, hides something more than a challenge: it is a call to unity of action. That’s why Torra has started talking to all the pro-sovereignty parties.
For the consultation that originated the great Catalan conflict, the large parties shared the tasks. “We must go back to work as we did two years ago: in order to carry out the referendum, we shared the task to be done. The CUP and the CDR put the people. They were responsible for preparing the polling stations and for them to open their doors. Without them, there would have been no polling stations. Esquerra, meanwhile, was in charge of hiding the polls with his people. And Convergència put the technicians. It was a shared task assignment. If you pay attention, according to the nature of the tasks entrusted, one party or another participated, but there was never interference. Everything was minutely studied”.
Last words of Jordi Cuixart in the trial of ‘procés’
This leader emphasizes that “the strength of the CUP is on the street” and that, in several weeks, the organization will hold a strategic debate that will mark the roadmap of the coming years. Carles Riera, leader of the CUP in the Parliament, demanded to Torra on Tuesday that he must begin “a cycle of popular mobilization and a strong anti-repressive institutional response, and this requires a great agreement and the maximum possible unity of the independence forces and the majority of society”. For Riera, the exercise of self-determination, which is the goal, cannot go through any form of dialogue, agreement or negotiation with the State. What remains?: “This will come through the unilateral route, the conflict and the democratic confrontation”.
Now, however, according to sources of the CUP to this newspaper, “nobody has the road map and you have to agree it. The bad thing is that it seems ERC does not want mobilizations. It does not want more tension. Therefore, Riera puts on the table the continuation of the motto ‘I would do it again’. Actually, it is to follow the guidelines of the only person detained who is not a politician, Jordi Cuixart. Evidently, Cuixart has done politics and has assumed political positions, but he did not participate in politics as a representative of any party”.
“There will be no fair ruling“
Quim Torra does not think that idea to be bad at all and he has not refrained himself of seconding Cuixart’s slogan in public. That is why a round of contacts with all the pro-sovereignty forces has begun with one objective: how to get people back on the streets. Either that or the demobilization ends with the ‘procés’ and independence becomes the dream of a summer night. For that reason, from the agencies of the Government, it is not seen with bad eyes a phrase that, in its last official communication, has left written Arran, the youthful organization of the CUP: “There will not be any sentence that could be just”. Based on that basis, the conflict is served.
Torra has begun a round of contacts with all the sovereignty forces with one objective: how to get people back out on the street
For Arran, “if the sentence is condemnatory, it means that they will spend more years in prison for exercising the right to self-determination. And if it is acquittal, they will have already spent almost two years on remand and for months they will have been the protagonists of a judicial farce”. The radicals want to create, however, a counter-power in the street that guides the actions of the institutions. That is, Torra is the one who applies what he is dictated from the streets. “It is necessary to fight in all the fronts open for struggle in the Catalan Countries, to generate structures and networks of popular power and to respond with mobilization and determination to any sentence of the political trials”, Arran warns.
The CUP, in addition, remembers that they still have in their hands the committees of defense of the republic (CDR), the instrument they have used for two years to mobilize the street. That instrument, they say, is not finished, but will still be “very useful” in the near future. In fact, they underline that “the CDR are committed to civil disobedience on a small scale. Little more we can do. With that, we hope to win the street again, although that is what ERC and the Artur Mas sector of Convergència do not want “.
Àngels Folch, former member of the ANC secretariat, said in an open letter this week: “We must remain firmer and more determined than ever to continue forward until the independence proclaimed on October 27, 2017 becomes effective”. She also noted that “we have all made mistakes, but those of the Spanish State are much larger and, as Carme [Forcadell] always said, the Spanish State helps us, its mistakes are much more serious and cannot be avoided because they are part of its reason of being, of its DNA “. For that reason, she emphasizes that “this unjust, vengeful sentence, typical of a dictatorship and not of a democracy, will not achieve its objective of making our politicians serve to frighten us with the objective that nobody dares to go to the second phase, the phase of making effective the proclaimed republic”. The activist calls to “forget about the parties, because the parties will not make the independence, the people will do it”.
This positioning, which coincides in large part with the continued mobilization advocated from Òmnium Cultural and from the CUP, with its CDRs at the front, can become a deadly pinch for Quim Torra, which due to ideological affinities would support that strategy with closed eyes but for Institutional responsibility he has to be more prudent.
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