Last week saw the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the military dictator ‘El Caudillo’ Francisco ‘Paco’ Franco, who reigned over an actual military dictatorship for almost 40 years and the Guardian ran a few pieces on it:
The first time I set foot in the Basque Country was in 1988 and I remember attempting to converse with my twenty one year old peers about the Spanish Civil War only to find out that I knew more about than them, this was largely due to the Pacto del Olvido, an informal agreement adopted during Spain’s transition after Franco’s death in 1975 where the political class and the public tacitly agreed to avoid legal and public discussion of the violence of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship to ensure a stable transition to democracy. This agreement was solidified by the 1977 Amnesty Law, which prevented accountability for crimes committed during the regime.
The legacy of this exists today in terms as while the Spanish secondary history curriculum contains the civil war the post war dictatorship is largely glossed over and the White Terror, the forced labour, the concentration camps, the industrial murder regime aren’t raised:
Pedro Sanchez’ Socialist Party government attempted to address this legacy when they introduced la Ley de Memoria Democrática in 2022:
I myself saw this law in action when on a quiet October afternoon in 2016 the remains of the ‘Butcher of the North’ General Emilio Mola and General José Sansurjo, the principal architect of the 1936 military coup were without fuss quietly exhumed from Los Caidos, the imposing mausoleum at the end of one of Pamplona’s most fashionable avenues, (photo above), and the name of the square where it is, Plaza de Conde Rodenzo, (named after Franco’s first ‘Justice Minister’), was renamed Askatasunaren Plaza, (Freedom Square), and returned to their families for private burial:
Which brings me from my adopted home to my true home. One of the Guardian articles above states:
Surveys have shown us that about 24% or 25% of people aged 18 to 30 said they wouldn’t mind living under an authoritarian regime [….]
There’s a whole generation – especially people between their 20s and the age of about 45, who have studied so little of all this, he said. They’ve only studied it if they had teachers who were interested in it, and who brought it into their lessons. But now with the democratic memory law, it’s obligatory
The UKG have proposed an official history of our two-decade-long conflict, as discussed in the Belfast Telegraph article, a deeply sensitive subject which will no doubt present many, many challenges:
We come from a still deeply polarised society with competing narratives of our troubled past. I come from West Belfast, the ground zero cockpit of the conflict and its experience and other areas like Derry City of the conflict will be different from that of say rural Fermanagh and North Down.
The challenge is, is it possible to come to an agreed narrative on it? Do we want to? Therein lies the paradox, are we capable of constructing a raw, warts and all coming to terms of our troubled past or do we simply draw a line and have a Pacto de Olvido of our own?
Hughie Beag is a West Belfast native and recovering legal scholar who spends lots of time in his spouse’s native Basque Country
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