Spain targets online group behind separatists’ protest
NEW disruptions to Catalonia’s transportation network yesterday followed clashes between activists and police over the conviction of separatist leaders, as Spanish authorities announced an investigation into the group organising the protests.
Authorities said that three people were arrested and more than 170 injured, including about 40 police officers, during the clashes between angry protesters and riot police at Barcelona’s International Airport and elsewhere across the north-eastern Spanish region.
Thousands of passengers were stranded at the airport, with many forced to walk with their luggage on highways and across fields.
The protesters were responding to an online campaign by Tsunami Democratic, a loose, leaderless grass roots group that uses encrypted messaging apps to call for peaceful disobedience.
Spain’s caretaker interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, said that authorities were investigating the group.
In a landmark ruling on Monday, Spain’s Supreme Court acquitted the Catalan politicians and activists of the more serious crime of rebellion for pushing ahead with a banned referendum on October 1, 2017, and declaring independence based on its results. But judges found nine of them guilty of sedition and handed down prison terms of nine to 13 years.
The court also barred all of them from holding public office.
That has an immediate impact on the upcoming November 10 election because six of them were planning to run as candidates.
The verdict is likely to be a central issue in the run-up to the vote, but “it’s unlikely to substantially alter the electoral outlook unless the situation worsens significantly in the region,” said Antonio Barroso, a political risk analyst with the London-based Teneo consulting firm.
He said Catalan separatist politicians wanted to use the backlash against the ruling to woo proindependence voters to the polls.
Spain’s caretaker prime minister and Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez, who won the April election but failed to get support for a minority government, is hoping to remain in office.
While Sanchez called for the beginning a “new phase” and urged Catalan separatists to abide by the law, the ruling invigorated the wealthy region’s independence movement, with many of its leaders making new calls to work towards effective secession or repeating the slogan “we will do it again”.
“We have to continue defending the right of Catalonia to self-determination,” the regional president, Quim Torra, told reporters in Barcelona yesterday.
The caretaker Spanish foreign minister, Josep Borrell, soon due to become the EU’s top diplomat, said the sentence wasn’t resolving the underlying political problems that only dialogue “in the framework of the constitution” could.
Spain’s airport operator, Aena, said that more than 1 000 flights were scheduled to operate normally in Barcelona yesterday, with around 20 flights cancelled compared to 110 on Monday.