Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Catalans say ‘yes’ to independence
BARCELONA, Spain — Catalonia’s regional government on Sunday declared a landslide win for the “yes” side in a disputed referendum on independence from Spain that degenerated into scenes of violence and mayhem as voters and police clashed.
Hundreds of police armed with truncheons and rubber bullets were sent in from other regions of Spain to confiscate ballots and stop the voting, and amateur video showed some officers dragging people out of polling stations by the hair, throwing some down stairs, kicking them and pushing them to the ground. Anguished, frightened screams could be heard.
By day’s end, Catalan health services said 844 civilians had been treated in hospitals for injuries, including two in serious condition and another person who was being treated for an eye injury that fit the profile of having been hit by a rubber bullet. Thirty-three police officers were also injured.
Regional government spokesman Jordi Turull told reporters early today that 90 percent of the 2.26 million Catalans who voted chose the side in favor of independence. He said nearly 8 percent of voters rejected independence and that the rest of the ballots were blank or void. He said 15,000 votes were still being counted.
The region has 5.3 million registered voters, and Turull said the number of ballots didn’t include those confiscated by Spanish police during the violent raids that aimed to stop the vote.
“The citizens of Catalonia have won the right to have an independent state,” Catalan President Carles Puigdemont said in a televised statement before vote tallies were announced, adding that he would keep his pledge
to declare independence unilaterally if the “yes” side won the referendum.
No one knows precisely what will happen if Catalan officials use the vote as a basis for declaring the northeastern region independent, a move that would threaten Spain with the possible loss of one of its most prosperous regions, including the popular coastal city of Barcelona, the regional capital.
Catalans favoring a break with Spain have long wanted more than the limited autonomy they now enjoy, arguing that they contribute far more than they receive from the central government, which controls key areas including taxes and infrastructure. The police aggression on Sunday was likely to only fuel the passion for independence, and the main separatist group urged the regional government to declare independence after the violent crackdown.
“Today the Spanish state wrote another shameful page in its history with Catalonia,” Puigdemont said, adding that he would appeal to the European Union to look into alleged human-rights violations during the vote.
“The European Union can no longer look the other way,” he said after the polls had closed. “It must act swiftly to maintain its moral authority inside and outside the continent when these abuses are scandalizing good men and women all around the world.”
Spain has become “the shame of Europe” with its iron-fist tactics, Turull said.
Police were acting on a judge’s orders to stop the referendum, which the Spanish government had declared illegal and unconstitutional — and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said going forward with the vote only served to sow divisions.
On Sunday night, Rajoy praised police for their “calmness” in defending the constitutional order after they raided polling stations and seized ballot boxes in their efforts to shut down the vote.
“We’ve proved that our rule of law has the resources to repel an attack on democracy of this magnitude,” Rajoy said in a televised statement. “Look for no culprits other than those who organized an illegal act and have broken our common bonds. We’ve witnessed the type of behavior that would be repugnant for any democrat: the indoctrination of children, persecution of judges and journalists.”
Spanish Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis said the violence, while “unfortunate” and “unpleasant,” was “proportionate.”
“If people insist in disregarding the law and doing something that has been consistently declared illegal and unconstitutional, law enforcement officers need to uphold the law,” Dastis said in an interview.
VIOLENCE AT THE POLLS
As polling stations prepared to open at 9 a.m., officers in riot gear smashed in the doors and dragged protesters away by the hair, beating some with batons and firing rubber bullets at others. Despite the clashes, the Catalan government said 73 percent of polling stations were open.
“There are no words to describe what this government has done,” said Anna Bonet, a 56-year-old homemaker who had waited since 6 a.m. to vote for independence. “We’re living under a state of emergency.”
Elisa Arouca, who was waiting to vote outside the Estel school in central Barcelona, reacted with anger when national police agents yanked her and other prospective voters out of the way, then smashed the door open and confiscated the ballot boxes.
She had been planning to vote in favor of keeping Catalonia part of Spain, but decided instead to join the march for independence. She moved to another polling station to try and cast her vote in favor of breaking away.
“I was always against independence, but what the Spanish state is doing is making me change my mind,” she said. “The national police and civil guard are treating us like criminals.”
A member of the Israeli parliament, sent in as an observer of the vote, said she was shocked by the use of rubber bullets by Spanish police against crowds of unarmed voters.
“We did expect a normal democratic process,” said Ksenia Svetlova, part of a delegation of 33 people invited by Catalan officials to observe the voting process. “We knew that a lot of police were here but still, you know, there should be a respect for the will of the people to vote regardless of what you think of the referendum.”
Tensions were running so high that Barcelona played its soccer game against Las Palmas without fans after the team announced shortly before kickoff that the match would be played behind closed doors, with thousands of soccer fans already outside the stadium.
Manuel Condeminas, a 48-year-old information technology manager who tried to block police from driving away with ballot boxes Sunday, said police had kicked him and others before using their batons and firing the rubber bullets.
Elsewhere, civil guard officers, wearing helmets and carrying shields, used a hammer to break the glass of the front door and a lock cutter to break into the Sant Julia de Ramis sports center, near the city of Girona, that was being used as a polling station. At least one woman was injured outside the building, wheeled away on a stretcher by paramedics.
Police had sealed off many voting centers in the hours before the vote to prevent their use. Others were filled with activists determined to hold their ground.
Spanish riot police forcefully removed a few hundred would-be voters from a polling station at a school in Barcelona. The scene was repeated at other locations, although voting was peaceful in some spots.
But activists at one polling station at an elementary school were two steps ahead. As the police forced their way through shouting crowds into the polling station, the organizers spirited away the ballots and hid them in the classrooms amid coloring books and crayons.
An hour later, after police had driven away in their big black vans, under a hail of insults, the ballot boxes reemerged and the voting began again.
As Sunday approached, the Madrid government tried everything it could to thwart the referendum: disabling the Internet, confiscating ballots, detaining some officials and threatening scores more with prosecution.
The vote took place in an atmosphere of cat and mouse and in improvised conditions, with a disputed census used as the voting list.
Catalan officials relied on privately printed ballots and changed the voting rules an hour before polls were scheduled to open, to allow voters to cast a ballot at any poll station, without using an envelope and regardless of whether they were registered there or not.
Information for this article was contributed by Aritz Parra, Joseph Wilson, Alex Oller, Gregory Katz and Frank Griffiths of The Associated Press; by Raphael Minder and Ellen Barry of The New York Times; by William Booth of The Washington Post; and by Esteban Duarte, Maria Tadeo, Rodrigo Orihuela, Charles Penty and Thomas Gualtieri of Bloomberg News.