Last September Spain's homegrown "super-judge"
Baltasar Garzónbest-known for his dramatic 1998
effort to arrest the late Chiilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet in London announced that he was
investigating not only the whereabouts of the
remains of the "disappeared" of the Spanish Civil
War (1936-1939), but also the huge numbers of
defeated Republicans executed by General
Francisco Franco in the grim postwar years. His
goal was to try to amass enough evidence to
charge Franco's regime posthumously with crimes
against humanity. Could it be that, after so
long, "help" and "pardon" were finally coming to
the descendants of those who died defending the Spanish Republic?
According to the great Hispanist Hugh Thomas, the
three-year Civil War claimed the lives of 365,000
Spaniards, a toll that includes both those loyal
to the fascist rebel Franco and those who opposed
him. Some historians put the figure higher. Both
sides carried out brutal executions, the bodies
of victims often ending up in unmarked mass graves.
When the Civil War ended in 1939, the victorious
Franco regime executed an additional one hundred
thousand-plus Republican prisoners, many of whose
corpses were flung into yet more mass-burial
pits. These unmarked mounds, visited stealthily
by the families of the "defeated" during the
dictatorship, are scattered the length and breadth of Spain.
<http://bostonreview.net/BR34.4/purcell.php>Link
--
Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/09/memory-that-will-not-die-exhuming.htm>monochrom
at 9/02/2009 11:45:00 AM
