Catalan leader: I need guarantee of fair trial
Sacked president of region says he will not be seeking political asylum in Brussels after charges of sedition
‘Prepare for a long road. Democracy will be the foundation of our victory’
CARLES PUIGDEMONT said yesterday that the fight for Catalan independence would continue following his decision to flee to Belgium, but refused to return to Spain unless he was guaranteed a fair trial.
The sacked leader of Catalonia faces a possible 30-year jail sentence on charges of rebellion and sedition after declaring Spain’s richest region an independent republic and precipitating Madrid’s worst constitutional crisis since the death of Franco.
A high court judge in Madrid has summoned Mr Puigdemont and the other 13 members of his ousted executive to testify on Thursday and Friday. If Mr Puigdemont or any of the accused refused to travel from Belgium for their court appearance, the judge could request a European arrest warrant to have them detained.
The judge has also ordered the 14 to post a collective €6.2million (£5.4million) as a bond to cover any civil liabilities arising from an eventual trial. Failure to do so by the end of the week would mean the court could begin to seize their personal assets.
In a packed and chaotic press conference in Brussels, Mr Puigdemont said he would accept snap Dec 21 elections called by Spain, which stripped the region of its autonomous powers after it held an illegal referendum on Oct 1.
“I ask the Catalan people to prepare for a long road. Democracy will be the foundation of our victory,” he said at the press conference, which was picketed by anti-independence protesters and conducted in French, Spanish, Catalan and English.
Flanked by six former ministers and with a police guard, the former president said he would not claim political asylum in Belgium and claimed he could fulfil his duties with part of his ousted government outside of Spain. After insisting he had fled to protect his fellow Catalans from Spanish government violence, Mr Puigdemont said he had come to Brussels because it was the capital of the European Union. “We have better guarantees for our rights here and we can meet our obligations from here,” he said at the press conference held in the very heart of the EU.
However, his hopes to drum up support for EU mediation in the crisis appear doomed to failure. The European Commission has stood solidly behind Mariano Rajoy’s government and a judgment by Spain’s constitutional court that the referendum was illegal.
Charles Michel, the prime minister of Belgium, said that Mr Puigdemont would be treated like any other EU citizen: “no more, no less”.
Asked when, or if, he would return to Barcelona, Mr Puigdemont said: “We are seeking guarantees from the Madrid government… If they can guarantee to all of us, and to me, a just, independent process, with the separation of powers that we have in the majority of European nations… we would return immediately.”
Outside, about 50 protesters sang Viva Espana and chanted “I am Spanish, I am Catalan”. They booed and jeered Mr Puigdemont as he was hustled to a waiting car. One of their number, Antonio Campuzano, 56, who is from Barcelona but lives in Brussels, said Mr Puigdemont was “a coward” who had “jumped ship”.
Mr Puigdemont and six members of his regional government had driven to Marseille before taking a flight to Brussels on Monday in an escape that exposed divisions in the former Catalan government. Santi Vila, who resigned from Mr Puigdemont’s cabinet on the eve of last Friday’s declaration of independence, said that “independence must be sought within the law”.
Xavier Garcia Albiol, the leader of Mr Rajoy’s Popular Party in Catalonia, said he felt “ashamed that the former president of the Catalan government should go to the heart of Europe to lie about Catalonia and Spain”.
In Paris, in July 1789, a London visitor “met the body of M Foulon who had his head cut off... they were dragging his bloody body naked through the streets”. Then that October, he “took a walk in the Tuileries. Saw two of the heads of the Gardes de Corps whom they were carrying about Paris upon spikes”.
Sound familiar? Not to the Catalans. For unlike the French Revolution some 230 years before it, Barcelona’s revolutionary balloon has most definitely deflated. And without Madrid even needing to employ a whiff of the grapeshot Napoleon used in 1795 to disperse the Royalists, or the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army that were rolled out by China in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Some might think this was inevitable: that Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan leader, was destined to lose his fight for independence, and end up in another country, rambling before the television cameras.
But Spain has a history of successful revolutions and revolts, albeit ones that only succeeded with foreign help and after much effort. Napoleon was driven out of the country with a helping hand from Wellington, after all, while the Second Republic was brought down with the heavy involvement of Italy and Nazi Germany.
Puigdemont’s push for independence, however, will probably join the ranks of the failures, alongside the Catalan Revolt of 1640-52 and the Carlist Wars of the 19th century. Or perhaps it is most like the comic opera of the attempted coup in 1981, which culminated in Francoist officers waving their arms around ridiculously in the Spanish parliament.
Where did the Catalans go wrong?
First, they lacked a willingness to fight and a degree of military support. They couldn’t rely, either, on the indecisiveness of their opponents. See Eastern Europe, notably the fall of Ceausescu in Romania in 1989, and conversely Russia in 1991. If Theresa May is worried, she should build up the army, pay them well and keep them at home. The French coup in 1830 succeeded because the elite units that supported the regime were mostly in Algiers. Memo: navies and air forces are far less useful for riot control or revolution prevention.
Secondly, they failed to choose their moment. Puigdemont is certainly no Lenin, but, then again, Barcelona 2017 is not St Petersburg in 1917. Crucially, Spain has not seen a failure in war sufficient to discredit the system, as happened in Russia.
Thirdly, they lacked allies. The Dutch fighting against Spain’s Philip II benefited from an English army sent by Elizabeth I. Frenchmen will tell you they won the American War of Independence. Mao benefited from Soviet support, the Viet Minh from that of China, and so on. Lacking foreign support can be fatal, as for the Confederacy in the American Civil War.
The Catalan separatists are isolated, and it is easier for Vladimir Putin to seek to manipulate American or British or French politics than that of a Spain where Castile is the basis of a Spanish nationalism that has long regarded dissent as rebellion.
So if you a betting man, do not take the odds: Catalonia will not win independence. Spanish politicians were willing to transform their constitution to join the EU, but will not do so for Catalonia even if every Catalan were to want to leave.
Jeremy Black is professor of history at the University of Exeter