Morning Star.png Never Forget! Republicans, Scottish Internationalists Honoured in Tarancon, Spain Lynne Walsh, The Morning Star, London, 20 February 2016 An extraordinary act of international fellowship took place yesterday at the small town of Tarancon, south-east of Madrid. Honouring international brigaders from Scotland who fought fascism and died in Spain, families, friends and comrades were joined by local people. Those who know of the country's bitter civil war and its haunted aftermath will realise that something unique has happened in this small municipal cemetery in the province of Cuenca. A memorial had been established, thanks to the efforts of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory at Cuenca (ARMH) through its organiser, Maximo Molina, Raul Amores, the previous mayor of Tarancon, and families of the Scots brigaders. A simple plaque on a stone slab, bearing the names of those who fell in the Battle of Jarama in February 1937, has been the centerpiece of annual commemoration ceremonies since its placement more than four years ago. A new memorial This year a new memorial has been set up, this time honouring the people of Tarancon itself, who suffered under Franco's rule. The ARMH discovered that the remains of the brigaders who had died in the three hospitals in Tarancon shared the same fate as the Republicans who had been held in prisons and concentration camps in the town, many of whom were shot in 1939. When the cemetery was reorganised in the 1970s these remains had simply been put in a heap, making it impossible to recover them subsequently. Mike Arnott of Dundee TUC and one of the key players in creating the memorial reminisces: "It took some doing to get a memorial here at all. Some people prefer to forget the struggle against Franco. We were determined that those who sacrificed their lives for the republic should not be forgotten. Reflect and grieve "We worked closely with our Spanish contacts and with family members, including Allan Craig Jr whose father had been injured at Jarama and brought here to the field hospital at Tarancon. Allan planted an olive tree in his father's memory. It was incredibly moving and this little monument started to become a place for local people to reflect and grieve. We shouldn't forget the civilian victims of the dictatorship. These townspeople and their families have lost loved ones, too." There were setbacks, however. In early 2012, members of the family of brigader William Crawford, one of the Scots named on the memorial, visited the cemetery along with Maximo - to find that the plaque had been vandalised. "This is not unknown in Spain. Memorials are damaged, and only recently, the one at Madrid's University City had been attacked and daubed in red paint. It has been cleaned up and repaired, as it always is," says Arnott. Undeterred by the vandalism in Tarancon, supporters set up a fundraising campaign, with contributions from the Craig and Crawford families and from a number of trade union branches and individuals, particularly in Allan Craig senior's home city of Dundee. A new plaque at the cemetery was unveiled during the Jarama March commemoration weekend in February 2013. Amigos de las Brigades Internationales Organised by the Asociacion de Amigos de las Brigades Internationales (AABI), this annual event brings together families, comrades and anti-fascists from all over the world. The following year, Molina was approached ahead of the event by local families who had lost relatives during the repression by the Franco dictatorship which followed the civil war. They asked if they could read the names of their murdered relatives at the International Brigade commemoration. "That 2014 event was so poignant, when the Tarancon families read the names of their fallen Republican relatives. "We realised that, although unintentionally at first, this event for the Scottish brigaders had created a space where local families felt comfortable to come forward and name their lost relatives, in their own town, for the first time in more than 75 years," remembers Arnott. What has become a joint act of remembrance now includes a reading of the names of the 39 Scots brigaders and a similar number of civilians from Tarancon, also killed. The memorial unveiled yesterday sees a new chapter in this decades-old story. . Today this year's Jarama March is visiting parts of the battlefield where fierce fighting involved the Polish Dabrowski (pronounced Dombrowski) Battalion. The son of Polish brigader Tadeusz Zbroinski joins several hundred marchers, who will sing, with the AABI Choir, the March of the Dabrowski Brigade. From: <http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-ada8-Scottish-internationalists-honour ed-alongside-Republicans-killed-in-Tarancon#.VsgCXfl9600> http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-ada8-Scottish-internationalists-honoure d-alongside-Republicans-killed-in-Tarancon#.VsgCXfl9600 -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "YCLSA Discussion Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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