The Fugitive
Catalan exile Clara Ponsati on life, loss and liberty as she faces 33 years in a Spanish jail
Exiled former Catalan minister Clara Ponsati sits in her small office at the University of St Andrews, which overlooks a cliff dropping to the ocean. It’s a fitting metaphor as she stands on a precipice of her own, fighting extradition from Scotland to Spain on grounds of “sedition”.
She can’t leave Scotland but this confinement is preferable to the alternative of 33 years in a Madrid jail.
The prospect of a Spanish prison is daunting but the renowned professor has faced far worse.
This week marks the seventh anniversary of the death of her son Guillem, who died at 33 from cancer.
She is momentarily muted by a gulp of tears as she looks to the sea, vast as her loss.
Clara said: “In a way, after losing a child, you are prepared for anything. Whatever else happens in life is just peanuts.
“I have been through difficult times these last months but, honestly, it can never be as bad.”
Her son grew up “smart and handsome”. With a degree in marine biology, he travelled to Emory University in Atlanta to do a PhD.
Not even three months in, he was diagnosed with a rare cancer of the sinus. By the time it was discovered, it was already terminal.
After surgery in America, his parents took him home to Barcelona for chemotherapy.
Clara said: “We knew it was hopeless. He was diagnosed in November and was dead by May.”
Through a filter of pervasive grief, she remains an optimist, with an easy laugh and mischief dancing in her eyes.
Her parents named her Clara, from the Latin meaning “famous” – prescient now but never what she craved.
She said: “I never wanted to be a public figure. I have always been more interested in watching people, than people watching me.”
Clara has been a visiting professor at the universities of Toronto, San Diego and Georgetown and was head of economics at St Andrews when she accepted the appointment
as Councillor of Education of the Generalitat of Catalonia in July 2017.
Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan president at the time, gave her eight hours to decide. After consulting her youngest son, Gordi, she felt a “moral obligation” and took a sabbatical from St Andrews.
Her government role was largely symbolic. She was not an MP and has no party membership – and she was supportive of, but not key to, the planning of the region’s referendum.
Yet the Spanish government accuse her of rebellion and misuse of public funds, holding her personally accountable for injuries sustained by police officers on the day of the poll.
Clara said: “The charges are nonsensical, the allegations are a fiction. I am not guilty of any of it.
“Spain calls itself a democracy – then discuss constitutional disagreements, don’t throw people in jail.”
Her face adorns banners in the Catalan pro-independence rallies, which have followed last October’s “illegal” referendum.
To Catalans she is a heroine. To Spain’s regressive judiciary, she is what fascist dictator Franco described as “an enemy of the state”.
She doesn’t feel heroic but accepts she has been brave.
Yet would she do it all again, knowing it would result in exile?
She admitted: “If I am honest, if I knew the whole thing, probably not. But one never knows the whole thing, right?”
Her father was a pharmacist; her mother a librarian. They weren’t radically political but were steeped in the Catalan traditions, which Franco violently oppressed.
Her uncle was jailed for participating in the anti-Francoist resistance and Clara remembers police raiding her grandmother’s home after his arrest.
She grew up in a modest Barcelona apartment, jostling for position between three sisters and one brother.
She was always left of centre, academic but with no master plan, and she embraced the rebellion of antiFranco protest when still at school.
When Franco died in November 1975, she was in her first year at Barcelona University and she recalls the jubilation.
She said: “The bastard took months to die because they kept him alive. We all had champagne waiting in the fridge.”
Friends tease Clara for her “culo inquieto”, her “restless backside” – the need to be perpetually active.
She describes herself as a free spirit, finding equal joy in open land or city scapes or skiing in the mountains.
It was while she was studying for a PhD at the University of Minnesota that she focused her ambition.
She married a history professor, an old friend from Barcelona who attended Princeton, and Guillem was born in the summer of 1985. Gordi arrived in 1991, after the couples’ return to Barcelona from the US.
Clara said: “It was intense being a mother and an academic. By that time I had developed academic ambition and I wanted to make it. It is a tough life of writing and rejection – and you still have to pick the children up from school and cook dinner. I managed.
“When you have young children, they are your focus. Then suddenly it’s gone and they have found their wings.”
Throughout her tribulations, Gordi has been her solace. She has been separated from her husband for almost a decade but they still talk every day.
Eight of her ministerial colleagues are behind bars in Spain, while others have gone into self-imposed exile like her.
She was in the Catalan parliament on the day of the referendum and, small as she is, she faced up to the Spanish police who broke through the doors. They aggressively pushed her aside, searched for, and failed to find, hidden ballot boxes but took her laptop.
On his death bed, Franco warned the nation to resist separatist movements, to “keep the lands of Spain united”. As though in posthumous honour, Madrid’s police bludgeoned peaceful protesters and left them bloodied on the streets.
Clara said: “Spain unleashed repression in the most unspeakable way but old ladies, ordinary men and women were so heroic. It surprised me, the level of their bravery.”
A state in which fascism was but a blink in history’s eye, had resurrected its inner brute.
Such a degree of force in an EU country was a moral offence yet it barely raised an eyebrow in Europe’s powerhouses.
But in ordinary homes in Scotland, there was instinctive repugnance, a resonance with our own heated, but peaceful, independence referendum.
Regardless of where we stood on separatism, we recoiled at Spain's brutality.
The ruling separatists in the Catalan parliament declared independence on October 27 but as the streets filled with celebration, Clara knew “we had failed to deliver” the dream. The Spanish government invoked Article 155 and Madrid wrested power to bring the Catalans to heel.
Clara refused to wait for inevitable arrest, feeling her voice would serve better as a “fighter rather than a martyr".
Reluctantly, she packed her bags and left the next day, friends driving her to Perpignan in France, where she took a train to Paris and her ex-husband. She
said: “My state of mind was pessimistic, I knew that I may never return.
“It was bad. I was very upset but the alternative was to give myself up and I would have found it humiliating. Perhaps that pride keeps me going.”
She left behind her 93 year-old mother in Barcelona and, after a period with her exiled colleagues in Brussels, she returned to the open arms of St Andrews.
On March 24, Spain’s supreme court, issued European arrest warrants for Clara and other separatist leaders.
She called human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar, who has since fiercely fought her corner.
Clara said: “I am grateful to Aamer. He is a great lawyer, a strategist and a fantastic person. He has passion.
“He cares, because he sees this as a human rights issue.”
The Spanish government have deep pockets and Anwar’s team must raise donations of more than £400,000 to tackle them in the courts. Clara said: “I think the Spanish claims are so outrageous, no sensible person can give them credit but we have to prove our point in court. I think we can do it, I have faith in the Scottish justice system, but it is a lot of work and it will be expensive.”
She will always be grateful for Scotland’s warm embrace, the strangers who stop her in the street, ask her for selfies and wish her luck.
Even when she handed herself in to an Edinburgh police station, the officers taking her fingerprints were apologetic and affording her utmost respect.
She said: “Scotland is a very unique society with people of modest means but deep convictions. They have shown me such affection. I feel that I am becoming a member of the community now, learning of its soul.”
In her worst nights, she imagines the turn of the lock in a Madrid cell, aware that at 61, she would likely die in jail.
But she will never relinquish the dream of a safe return to her beloved Barcelona.
“You know what I would do?” she said with a smile. “I would just stroll on the streets for hours, with no plan and no need for a raincoat.”
To donate to Clara’s defence, go to www.crowdjustice.com/case/defendclara/
We can do it.. I have faith in the Scottish justice system
CLARA PONSATI ON HER FIGHT TO AVOID EXTRADITION