Sun Times: Spain confronts its fascist demons

Sunday Times
November 21, 2004

Spain confronts its fascist demons
Ed Owen, Madrid and Peter Conradi

FOR those who turned out yesterday in the pale autumn sunshine that
lit up the Guadarrama mountains, northwest of Madrid, it was the most
sacred day in the calendar.

Thousands of mourners, many wearing sunglasses and blue shirts
reminiscent of the fascist uniform, travelled to the last resting
place of General Francisco Franco for a mass marking the 29th
anniversary of the Spanish dictator's death.

Joined by Franco's daughter, Carmen Franco Polo, the crowd watched as
the shadow of a 500ft-high cross above his tomb lengthened across the
sierra. Then they moved inside the cavernous basilica which Franco had
carved for himself out of the sheer rock by political prisoners.

This annual reminder of its fascist past came at an uncomfortable
moment for Spain, which found itself under scrutiny last week after a
football friendly with England was marred by racist chants directed at
the visiting black players.

Displays of the type seen on Wednesday at Real Madrid's Bernabeu
stadium sit uneasily with Spain's image as one of Europe's most
dynamic and progressive countries. Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the
socialist prime minister swept to power in March in the aftermath of
the Madrid train bombings, has championed liberal causes such as the
legalisation of gay marriage.

The Spanish media and football authorities glossed over the incident
at first, accusing their British counterparts of a witch-hunt. Some
hinted the fuss was little more than an attempt to spoil Madrid's
hopes of beating London to host the 2012 Olympics. But as the week
went on and Miguel Angel Moratinos, the foreign minister, apologised
on behalf of the government, the mood changed.

The Spanish football federation must have known it was taking a risk
by staging the first international in 10 years at Bernabeu. For years
Real Madrid has been criticised for appearing to tolerate on its
stands Ultra Sur, a band of neo-Nazi supporters only recently banned
from waving the swastika flag. Its members are believed to have led
the chanting.

It has emerged that a number of black footballers at Spanish clubs,
such as Samuel Eto'o, Barcelona's star striker from Cameroon,
regularly suffer racist abuse during matches.

Although Eto'o has said he accepts praise and insults as a fact of
football life, Momo Sissoko, 19, from Mali, a midfield player for
Valencia, is having as bad a season as his club.

"They insult me every week in Spain," Sissoko told Marca, a sports
paper. "Things need to change. This happens every week at football
grounds in Spain. The situation is serious."

Spain has been struggling to assimilate an rise in the number of
immigrants — increasingly from Africa — that has transformed it in
less than 10 years from a largely homogeneous nation into a
multicultural one. The infrastructure is struggling to cope. With
unemployment at 10.5%, job prospects are not as rosy as the new
arrivals hoped.

A clear alarm was sounded in El Ejido, a dusty provincial town near
Almeria, southeast Spain, to which Moroccans and other immigrants
flock to tend salad, vegetable and fruit crops grown under plastic
sheeting. In February 2000 the worst race riots seen in Spain broke
out after a mentally ill Moroccan killed a local woman.

Although there has been no repetition of such violence, experts say
anecdotal evidence suggests racist attacks — though not recorded by
police — have increased. The strain intensified after the Madrid train
bombings by Islamic extremists that killed 191 on March 11. Last month
150 in Siguerlin de Santa Coloma de Gramenet, near Barcelona, shouted
insults outside a mosque during Ramadan.

There have also been claims that the police and judiciary are biased
against minorities. A provincial court in Huelva, south-west Spain,
this month absolved three men of killing a 60-year-old Moroccan at a
bus station. In Madrid 50 people, mainly Africans, demonstrated after
a Spanish nightclub bouncer was found not guilty of killing a
16-year-old Angolan.

Analysts warn against singling out Spaniards for criticism at a time
when race relations in some European countries have been imperilled,
apparently by surges in immigration coupled with heightened fears of
Islamic terrorism.

The phenomenon was demonstrated by the backlash in Holland after the
killing in Amsterdam this month of Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch film-maker
whose work outraged Muslims.

Paul Preston, a professor of Spanish history at the London School of
Economics, said Spain was almost alone in Europe in not having a
strong anti-immigrant party.

"A lot of Franco's rhetoric was about evil foreigners and getting back
to the quintessence of Spanishness and a lot of that has left some
kind of legacy, especially among older people," Preston said.

"Franco tried to keep alive the burning hatreds in Spain between
victors and vanquished in the civil war. The irony is that a huge
swathe of the population, probably 90%, completely reject violence and
dictatorship. Spain remains a place of contradictions."


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