A comment on Nicholas Casey's article about the "pardons" in NYT.
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Spain Pardons Jailed Catalan Separatist Leaders. A major step toward defusing tensions in a conflict that has long divided Spain prompted mixed reactions from an independence movement" (NYT, 22 June 2021), fails to mention the opinion a single pro-indepence source. Instead he quotes the opinions of two renowned, even notorious, opponents of independence. This gives the reader an unbalanced view, written (what is more) in Madrid, where neo-Fascists and conservatives are up in arms), not in Catalonia, where the pardons take effect.
Firstly, readers note further down that this pardon is partial. Firstly, the Catalan political prisoners has spent over three and a half years in jail. Secondly, as stated, their rights to political or public office have not been restored (which means they cannot return to the Catalan Parliament until the end of this decade at the earliest. Thirdly, it only affects nine people (two social leaders and six former members of the Catalan government, plus the former Speaker) and not the 3,300 other Catalans awaiting trial for their part in the referendum. Fourthly, rather than s Spanish concession, the government has been forced to bow to Catalan demands, given its scathing reprimands from the UN WG on Arbitrary Detention, the Council of Europe, courts in Belgiu, Scotland and Germany, Amnesty International etc.
The new wounds that Spain's repressive action (affecting even a highly respected former Harvard professor, Andreu Mas-Colell, who has received the support of 33 shocked Nobel prize laureates) opens practically every day reduce the political impact of the pardons in Catalonia to a mere ripple.
Mr Casey says that "The 2017 referendum was held in the face of a court ruling that it was illegal. The separatists declared victory despite opinion polls showing the public divided on the issue". It was the Catalan government that announced the results, not "the separatists", and the referendum, despite savage repression by the Spanish police in some polling stations (as widely covered at the time, and remembered every day by democrats in Catalonia), allowed everyone who felt entitled to express their opinion on the independence of the Catalan people, in favour or against, were able to do so - though hundreds of thousands of their votes were then confiscated by the police. Opinion polls reflect the views of all the inhabitants of Catalonia, be they Catalan-born, Spanish-born or born abroad. A large number of them do not claim to belong to the Catalan people, legitimately enough, or identified with central government which had time and again refused to allow the Catalans to express themselves on this subject at the ballot box.
Finally, successive surveys in the period after the devastating 2010 Constitutional court ruling showed that 70% (and in some cases 80%) of the respondents favour a referendum on Catalonia's independence.
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