Massive march demands release of Catalan leaders
BARCELONA: Hundreds of thousands of people marched in Barcelona on Sunday to protest the jailing of nine Catalan separatist leaders facing trial on “rebellion” charges.
Chanting “Freedom for the political prisoners”, they marched along Parallel Avenue, a main thoroughfare, many waving the redand-yellow Catalan flag.
The protest comes six months after the first incarcerations of top Catalan separatist leaders for misuse of public funds, sedition and rebellion -- which carries a prison sentence of 30 years and implies that a “violent uprising” took place -- over their separatist push.
“Since they could not decapitate separatism, they are trying to do it through the courts,” Roser Urgelles, a 59-year-old teacher, said at the protest.
“They need to demonstrate that there was violence to execute the sentences that they want, so they invent it,” she said, adding: “But we will continue to protest peacefully.”
Like thousands of others at the march, she wore a yellow ribbon to show solidarity with the jailed leaders, whom Catalan separatists consider to be “political prisoners”.
Spain’s justice minister, Rafael Catala, has called the use of yellow ribbons “insulting”, arguing that Spain has no political prisoners but “politicians in prison”.
The Guardia Urbana, a Catalan municipal police force, said 315,000 people turned out.
The demonstration was organised by two grassroots independence groups, the ANC and Omnium, whose presidents are among the nine separatist leaders in prison awaiting trial over their role in last year’s failed breakaway bid by Catalonia.
A total of 957 buses brought protesters from across the wealthy northeastern region of Spain to Barcelona, the Catalan capital, for the march, the ANC said in a statement.
The protest was backed by the Catalan branches of Spain’s two largest trade unions, the CCOO and the UGT, sparking unease among union members who oppose independence.
“There have been tensions (among unions members) just like in the rest of the Catalan society,” the secretary general of the Catalan branch of UGT, Camil Ros, said.
“But it is not a separatist protest. It is time to build bridges and the Catalan problem cannot be solved through the courts but by dialogue and politics.”
The demonstration comes 10 days after a German court dismissed an extradition request for Catalonia’s ousted separatist president Carles Puigdemont on grounds of rebellion and released him on bail.