26 Oct 2011 Una democràcia amb memòria

Last Thursday 20th October, shortly after ETA announced its definitive cessation of its terrorist activities, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero gave one of the best considered and best delivered speeches of his erratic career as country leader. He made the following statement: “Our democracy will be a democracy without terrorism, but not without memory. We will always remember the victims – the 829 fatalities -, their families and so many injured who have suffered the unfair and despicable blow of terror. And so will the future generations in Spain”. This is a fundamental point of the Spanish president’s solemn speech: by combining “democracy” and “memory” when referring to the victims of ETA, Zapatero is implying that an official compromise has been reached; although perhaps this compromise is not and will not be of the kind which many hope. The soon-to-be ex-president’s words are extremely ambiguous: What type of memory does Zapatero refer to? How will this memory materialise?

We cannot change where we come from. Is the system constructed since Franco’s death democracy with memory? If we are honest and accurate, I am afraid the answer has to be No. Contrary to what we were told by some, the transition to democracy was not about building harmony nor about elaborately and consciously overcoming  the trauma of the Civil War. None of this happened. The transition was a very complex and eventful process based on simply “dropping the matter”. Without any agenda or ceremony of forgiveness or public apology, this process had one sole objective, to which all political manoeuvres and transactions were subordinated: averting a new civil war.

This objective was undeniably essential and historic. But the means of achieving it did not include an homage to the memory of the victims and, thus, posed many problems and, especially, generated a series of consequences which in the long term have contributed to considerably weaken the political culture which should oxygenate the democratic system. There is one example which is less anecdotal than it might seem and illustrates the political culture’s acute anaemia: while ETA lays down its arms, a fascist party like Falange Española, which advocates a regime based on the physical removal of the opposition, continues to be legal and is allowed to demonstrate in the streets as if nothing had happened.

The archaeologists of the transition have given the whole thing a plausible explanation: during the period between 1975 and 1978, neither the supporters of Franco nor the democratic opposition were strong enough to win by knock-out and this forced very delicate agreements in order to leave the dictatorship behind. Fine. Let us agree that there was no other way. On the one hand, amnesty for political prisoners; on the other, complete and everlasting impunity for those who had denounced, tortured and murdered throughout forty years of tyranny. All the parties which wanted a place in the new era agreed on this, even leaders so ideologically diverse as Manuel Fraga and Santiago Carrillo  (he who now, by the way, takes the judge Baltasar Garzón’s side in his quest to initiate a trial against the Franco-era which Carrillo himself, back then, did not want). In any case, it is obvious that the Spanish democracy cannot parade itself as a democracy with memory, quite the opposite.

Considering that this is our recent tradition when it comes to relating democracy and memory, what Zapatero announced last week must necessarily be a political, civil and ethical novelty. Otherwise, the president would have said nothing and we would be clear that the victims of ETA would suffer the same misfortune as those of the dictatorship or those of the violence of the Civil War, who are not being used nowadays for partisan propaganda.

I prefer to think -maybe with too much optimism – that Zapatero’s entourage know how to manage the memory of the victims of ETA with completely different parameters from those used to mask the pain of those victims rejected by democracy without any qualms. We do not know what Mariano Rajoy’s entourage thinks about this issue, but he is the one whose job it will be to realise these good intentions.

The scale of this challenge is extraordinary. Two apparently conflicting principles need to be harmonised. First: the victims deserve an apology and recognition (also from the former terrorists and their supporters) on which to base a true civil reconciliation; at the same time, though, they cannot be the main figures in the deployment of the peace process, since their nature excludes them from being political actors and puts them on a different level. And second: the victims’ public memory needs to be preserved and spread in order to promote a pedagogy of peace with the fullest social and political consensus; in other words, the victims’ memory must have an appropriate presence within the new reality which is just beginning and it is crucial to use it in the right proportions. Memory is always the result of a balance between remembering and forgetting; hence, forgetting too much sentences us to repeat the past and a overdose of remembrance paralyses us and does not let us move forward. A society can become ill if it does not find balance and measure when it comes to combining traumatic memory and collective hope.

We have the opportunity now to treat victims with much more respect, dignity and justice than thirty years ago. I repeat: not in order to give them a central role in the decision making – as those who deny that we are in a new era would like – but in order to build once and for all a democracy free of cracks.