EU crisis over Catalan poll violence
Brussels fails to criticise Spain for violent response after hundreds of voters are injured in police clashes
THE EU was plunged into a new crisis last night after hundreds of people were injured in violent clashes with Spanish police attempting to crush Catalonia’s unauthorised independence referendum.
In brutal scenes broadcast around the world, officers in riot gear fired rubber bullets into crowds and beat would-be voters with batons as they queued at polling stations.
The Catalan government claimed 761 people were injured. There was widespread condemnation of the attempt to crackdown on the vote, which Catalan authorities had called despite Spain’s courts ruling it was illegal.
Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan president, claimed victory as preliminary results showed 2,020,144 voted “yes” (92 per cent) and 176,565 voted “no”. “We have won the right to be an independent state,” he said.
The results would be taken to the parliament in the coming days to begin the process of separation, he said.
He also issued a plea to the EU, saying this was “no longer an internal matter” and that Catalans had earned the right to be “respected” in Europe.
The EU remained conspicuously silent on the police tactics, which included masked officers smashing their way into polling stations and forcibly removing ballot boxes.
Footage showed officers from the national police – 4,000 of whom had been brought in by the Spanish government to help quash the ballot – fighting with elderly voters, some of whom were left bleeding, and dragging young women away from polling stations by their hair. Catalan firefighters appeared to act as human shields to protect voters from advancing lines of police.
Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, told The Daily Telegraph last night: “Obviously we are very anxious about any violence. We hope that things will sort themselves out, though clearly you have to be sensitive to the constitutional proprieties.
“As I understand it, the referendum is not legal, so there are difficulties.”
Andrew Rosindell, a Tory MP who sits on the foreign affairs select committee, said he believed the EU’S response would have been much stronger if similar scenes occurred in countries in the bloc that were less sympathetic to the Union, and it was “showing itself again to be completely hypocritical”.
Mr Rosindell accused the Spanish government of trying to “bully the people” and said that the violence “shows both Spain and the EU in a very bad light”. He said: “For years the Spanish have used the Guardia Civil to make life as difficult as possible for Gibraltar and they are using the same police force again to attack the people of Catalonia.
“In other circumstances there is no doubt the EU would be coming down like a ton of bricks. They are demonstrating double standards. If this was happening in Hungary, or another country, there would certainly be a different reaction.”
While some MEPS, including Guy Verhofstadt – the European Parliament’s Brexit negotiator – condemned the police violence as “disproportionate”, the European Commission said it would not respond to the crisis until today. European leaders were also noticeably silent. The only voice emerging from Brussels was that of the Belgian prime minister, Charles Michel, who called for political dialogue to resolve the crisis, tweeting: “Violence can never be the answer!”
Spain, however, did not waver in its assertion that the referendum – which
was suspended by order of the Spanish constitutional court – was illegal, and maintained that its hand had been forced by a Catalan government it claimed was engaged in a coup.
Foreign minister Alfonso Dastis said the violence was “unfortunate” and “unpleasant” but “proportionate”, blaming it exclusively on Mr Puigdemont and his regional government.
Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s prime minister, last night said: “We did what we had to do,” and described the ballot as a “premeditated attack on the legality of the Spanish state faced down with serenity by the forces of order”.
Making no mention of the large number of people injured in police charges outside polling stations, Mr Rajoy said: “Democracy won today because the constitution was upheld”. Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, the deputy prime minister, criticised the Catalan government’s “irresponsibility” in insisting on holding an “illegal referendum with no democratic guarantees”, demanding that they end what she described as a “farce”.
The Catalan government contended it had been forced to go ahead with the poll after the central government consistently refused substantive negotiations over the region’s status.
Mr Puigdemont insisted yesterday that the poll had been carried out successfully despite the police crackdown, with voting taking place in 95 per cent of polling stations.
“Batons against ballot boxes, violence against public spirit,” he said. “The shame will stay with [Spain] forever”. Security concerns even had an impact on yesterday’s football. FC Barcelona initially suspended its home match against Las Palmas as a precaution but ended up playing behind closed doors.
Yesterday the European Commission said it had nothing to add a statement made by Jean-claude Juncker, its president, on Friday, when he backed “the rule of law” in Spain.
But human rights groups around the world contended that regardless of the legality of the poll, the heavy-handed response went beyond what was unacceptable in a 21st-century democracy.
Andrew Stroehlein, of Human Rights Watch, said that despite the court suspension, the government had a duty to protect the rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression.