Blood spattered and defiant, the voters of Catalonia take stand against police
Rubber bullets flew and elderly women were wounded as officers waded into polling stations
IT WAS the day that many had feared but few had truly imagined: heavily armed Spanish police dragging voters from the ballot box, batons and rubber bullets flying, and elderly women with gushing head wounds.
Police helicopters hovered over polling stations across Catalonia as riot officers charged at unarmed voters to crush an independence referendum that Madrid branded a coup.
“This is shameful, this is a dictatorship,” cried Gina Carreras, a 53-yearold standing in the rain outside the Colegio Infant Jesus in Barcelona’s Gracia neighbourhood, where police had tried to force their way through the school’s iron gates to push back voters.
The officers finally retreated; but an elderly lady was left with blood pouring down her face. “We need the European Union to help us,” she pleaded.
Still the voters refused to abandon the centre, their determination hardened by the violence.
“We will stay here until we can vote,” Mercedes Carral, a 59-year-old lawyer, told The Daily Telegraph.
The Spanish government was “incapable of talking, incapable of accepting that others want something different,” she said. “It is indefensible”.
Soon, the persistence paid off, and applause rippled through the crowd as the vote reopened.
“We’ve done it,” exclaimed one woman emerging from the gates to cheers. Elation swelled as Artur Mas, the former Catalan president who began the referendum drive, arrived to cast his vote.
Mr Mas, regarded as a criminal by Madrid and a hero by independence supporters, displayed a martyr’s defiance as he was greeted with handshakes and tearful embraces. He had recently been ordered to pay five million euros for organising the consultation vote of September 2014.
“The image is of a people who are doing everything possible to vote and of a government that wants to stop it violently,” he declared.
It was an image repeated across the autonomous community; videos of police raining blows on those who refused to abandon the poll.
At the Ramon Llull school near the Sagrada Familia, police fired rubber bullets to disperse the crowd: one person was taken for surgery after being shot in the eye.
At some polling stations firefighters acted as human barriers between voters and riot police. Footage posted on social media showed one incident in which they too were charged by police, receiving truncheon blows during a stand-off outside a school.
By 9pm, the Catalan government said 761 people had been treated by the emergency services, and two remained in hospital. Thirty-three officers from the National Police and Guardia Civil reportedly sustained minor injuries.
Even Catalan government officials were not spared. At the local department of education, another Barcelona polling station, Clara Ponsati, the education secretary, was dragged from the building. She later told Catalan radio that agents had assaulted her,
‘If Brussels overlooks this, it will be an accomplice to this violation of human rights’
pulled her along the ground and seized her ipad. “No one can afford this,” she told the station. “If Brussels overlooks this, it will be an accomplice to this violation of human rights.”
The scenes prompted alarm around the world, but the government in Madrid remained resolute, insisting the Catalans had only themselves to blame. Enric Millo, head of the Spanish government delegation in Catalonia – and heavily protected by armoured vans and riot police – said Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan president, and his government “are the only ones responsible for what is happening and what could happen if they don’t put an end to this”.
Soraya Saenz de Sanataria, the Spanish deputy prime minister, said she saw no referendum taking place, only a “farce”. The only people taking part were independence radicals, she said, and that the police response was “proportionate”.
Such messages fell on deaf ears in Catalonia, where pensioners and students alike shook angry fists at walls of riot shields and beamed as they exited polling stations in triumph.
Laia Roura, a 21-year-old student, rejected Madrid’s apportion of blame. “It’s not fair, we are a democracy and we have the right to vote as people and express ourselves,” she said. “We have human rights.”
One witness, who did not wish to be named, told The Telegraph the Spanish government’s persistent opposition to a vote had only served to feed the independence movement. “This is a very bourgeois neighbourhood,” he said. “People were not into independence at all here six or seven years ago. But it has completely changed, and this is what happens when you get repression from Madrid.”
To many in Catalonia, the sight of Spanish police charging at voters and seizing ballot boxes touches sensitive historical wounds.
Under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, Catalan’s identity and language were heavily repressed and its institutions dissolved. The Catalan president was publicly executed outside Montjuic Castle.
Some in the independence movement, particularly on the hard Left, argue that some of the ideologies of the dictatorship still linger in the Spanish establishment and risk pushing the view of Madrid as authoritarian further into the mainstream.
Violence also threatened to spread between supporters and opponents of independence within Catalonia, with a fight breaking out in Barcelona’s Plaza Catalunya and an independence supporter in the suburb of Cornella being attacked men bearing Spanish flags.
Some Catalans who object to the unilateral nature of the poll stayed away, pointing to its illegality within the Spanish constitution, or to its unconventional staging, with electronic vote count systems blocked and voters allowed to attend any polling station.
“I didn’t even receive a ballot paper, so no, I won’t vote,” said Oriel, a taxi driver watching the events unfold. “I understand that people want this but it’s not the way to do it.” Marc Carrasco, a poll worker from the proindependence group the Catalan National Assembly, told The Telegraph that he had a message for Madrid: “Members of the government, if you have a part of the population that sincerely and pacifically – for six or seven years, every month, every year – is asking for this, you are obliged to attend to it.”
Mr Puigdemont, as Catalan president, delivered a similar message: “The Spanish state is showing that it only has force and imposition as arguments to try to convince the Catalans”.
The actions of the Spanish security forces to stop the vote “will remain forever in our memory,” he added.
But he alluded too to the benefits the independence movement might gain from the events being beamed around the world.
“Today the Spanish State has lost a lot more than it had lost till now,” he said, while “in Catalonia we have won much more than we had.”