Separatists vow to defy police ultimatum over Catalonia vote

BARCELONA, SPAIN » Catalonian separatists vowed Saturday to ignore a police ultimatum to leave the schools they are occupying to use in a vote seeking independence from Spain. As police methodically sealed off hundreds of schools, some parents decided to send their children home and girded for pre-dawn confrontations Sunday with police.

Tensions rose across the country over the planned vote. In the Spanish capital of Madrid, thousands marched to protest the separatists’ attempt to break up their nation, demanding that Catalan leaders be sent to jail. In Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, thousands more took to the streets to urge their prosperous region to stay inside Spain.

The police deadline of 6 a.m. Sunday for the activists, parents and children in the occupied Catalan schools is designed to prevent the vote from taking place, since the polls are supposed to open three hours later.

Spain’s Constitutional Court suspended the independence vote more than three weeks ago and the national government calls it illegal. Police have been ordered to stop ballots from being cast on Sunday and have been cracking down for days, confiscating millions of ballots and posters.

Catalonia’s defiant regional government is pressing ahead despite the ban and the police crackdown, urging the region’s 5.3 million registered voters to make their voices heard.

Spain’s foreign minister said Saturday the Catalan government’s plan is antidemocratic and runs “counter to the goals and ideals” of the European Union.

“What they are pushing is not democracy. It is a mockery of democracy, a travesty of democracy,” Minister Alfonso Dastis told The Associated Press.

A top Spanish security official in Catalonia says police have already sealed off more than half of the 2,315 polling stations and disabled software that was to have been used in the referendum. Enric Millo, the highest-ranking Spanish official in the northeastern region, said parents and students were found to be occupying at least 163 schools — but about 1,000 more still need to be checked.

The regional police force has been ordered not to use force in vacating the schools. Millo said anyone remaining in schools after 6 a.m. will need to be removed in line with a judge’s order.

“I trust in the common sense of Catalans and that people will operate with prudence,” he said.

Authorities have already confiscated 10 million paper ballots in the last few days — which will make it much more difficult for Catalonian officials to carry out an effective vote.

Millo said the government would tolerate ad hoc voting in the streets but that any results could not be considered a valid electoral test.

“They can always put a makeshift table in the street, with some buckets, and put papers in,” he said. “But what Catalan authorities have promised, an effective referendum with legal basis and binding, is something that won’t happen.”

At the Congres-Indians school in Barcelona, designated as a polling place, activist Quim Roy said he would be sending his two daughters home before the deadline out of concern for possible violence. He said other parents planned to do the same.