LAYING MEMORY’S GHOSTS TO REST
FT
October 28 2007 20:36
Sunday’s beatification by the Vatican of 498 "martyrs" killed by
anti-clerical militias during the Spanish republic and 1936-39 civil
war has resurrected many ghosts at a time when history and memory
have returned to haunt Spain.
Three decades on from the internationally lauded transition to
democracy from Franco’s dictatorship, Spain’s political tribes,
at least, are far from reconciled.
The Socialist government of José Luis RodrÃguez Zapatero has
enÂraged the rightwing opposition Popular party and Catholic hierarchy
by introducing a law on "historical memory". This aims to overcome
the negotiated amnesia of the post-Franco pact, whereby the crimes of
the civil war and its vengeful Francoist victors would be forgotten
(and the evidence destroyed).
While politically expedient at the time, that denied decent burial to
thousands of defeated Republicans, whose remains are being excavated
all over Spain; about 500 mass graves have been found in Andalusia
alone.
There are obvious risks in excavating the pain of the past. Yet the
selective memory preferred by the Catholic Church and the right is
not the answer. Countries and peoples need a shared narrative of their
past, even when that means settling painful accounts with history.
The Kaczynski twins in Poland dismayed their European allies by
exhuming the skeletons of Nazism and Stalinism. But the real problem
was that they did this in a vengeful spirit, antagonising Poland’s
friends and monopolising their country’s tragic history for partisan
ends.
Postwar Europe’s record of remembering – with the notorious exception
of Germany – is patchy at best. Indeed, one of the reasons the
European Union so disastrously failed to manage the break-up of
Yugoslavia was that it had so successfully forgotten its own past –
including of mass ethnic cleansing.
Turkey is in a similar bind over Armenia. Attempts by France, and
now the US Congress, to characterise the first world war massacres
of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks as genocide have outraged the
government and the Kemalist establishment, and inflamed public opinion.
In calmer circumstances, Turkish politicians and intellectuals will
acknowledge the need to come to terms with this blood-soaked chapter
in their history – and that Turkey has no hope of ever entering the
EU without such a reckoning.
But today’s Turks have no knowledge of these horrific events, which
have been airbrushed from history, leaving them without the means to
make a judgment. There is always a price for suppressing memory.
–Boundary_(ID_y6TIER5e0irhB5vaICpiMQ)–