Spain to amend painful chapter

MADRID - Spain will take a historic step today in confronting its past when parliament unveils a new law aimed at granting justice to hundreds of thousands of long-neglected victims of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.

Debated fiercely for more than a year, the law contains the most explicit, formal condemnation to date of General Francisco Franco's four-decade regime. Among other things, it requires the removal of statues, plaques and other symbols that still exist in honor of the late dictator. But facing the past has inflamed passions in this polarized society.

Conservatives are saying the law only reopens wounds better left undisturbed, while some victims of Franco's regime and their families are unhappy that the measure does not go far enough.

Nearly 32 years after Franco died, and 71 years after the fascist general overthrew an elected leftist government, igniting a devastating civil war, Spain is undergoing an unprecedented examination of the period's brutalities.

Across the country, families have begun exhuming long-dead relatives from the clandestine common graves where many opponents of the regime ended up. New books, seminars and exhibitions have aired stories and events kept under wraps for years.

The Law of Historical Memory, which is virtually assured of passage today, is the landmark contribution to this process by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and his Socialist government. Zapatero's grandfather was executed by Franco loyalists.

Under its terms, some of which might yet be amended ahead of today's scheduled vote in parliament, Franco-era political courts that jailed thousands of dissidents will be declared illegitimate, along with the sentences they handed down; guerrillas who fought the dictatorship will be recognized; and it will be made easier for victims to apply for indemnifications.

The law declares that the Valle de los Caidos monument outside Madrid, where Franco is buried, be used to salute all who were killed in the war, and not as a place to pay homage to fascism.

All sanctions, judicial sentences and personal violence "produced for reasons of politics, ideologies or religious belief" during the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship "are recognized and declared as radically unjust," the draft of the law states.

The government argues that it is important to honor and provide a catharsis for those who suffered under the dictatorship and those who fought the losing battle against Franco and his army.

The war, in which historians estimate up to half a million people were killed, was widely seen as a precursor to World War II. Franco's forces, backed by Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church, overthrew the elected Second Republic, a leftist government with backing by the Soviet Union.

Both sides committed atrocities in the war, but the government says that right-wing forces and Franco supporters were years ago given reparations, proper burials and ample recognition. Those from the other side were relegated to ignominy.

"We want acknowledgment for the people who fought Franco, the people who died in a war that should not have taken place," Esperanza Martinez Garcia, an 80-year-old former fighter who spent 15 years in jail as a political prisoner, said yesterday.

"I always kept my dignity, and I've never been ashamed of my being in jail . . . but there are people whose entire life was taken away, because they were killed or because they spent so many years in prison."

To guarantee Spain's peaceful transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975, politicians (many of whom had been Franco supporters) agreed to put aside the past. There were none of the truth commissions or judicial inquiries of other postwar societies.