Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

HISTORY

Spanish councils ordered to remove Franco symbols once and for all

Spain's justice ministry has ordered more than 600 municipalities across the country to remove symbols honouring the dictatorship of dictator Francisco Franco which are still on display in public spaces.

Published: 6 February 2019 15:16 CET
Spanish councils ordered to remove Franco symbols once and for all
A statue of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco still stands in the Spanish city of Melilla. Photo: AFP

A so-called “Historical Memory” law approved in 2007 requires the removal of all remaining Franco symbols such as street names bearing the name of Franco generals and statues from public spaces. Some exceptions are allowed for works of particular religious or artistic significance.

But according to the National Statistics Institute (INE) there are still 1,171 streets and squares across Spain named after Franco-era government figures, the justice ministry said in a statement.

The managing director of the justice ministry's Historical Memory department has written to all 656 municipalities which still have Franco-era symbols to demand the “immediate withdrawal of shields, emblems, panels and other objects” which commemorate the dictatorship, the statement added.

Since he came to power in June, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has made rehabilitating the memory of the hundreds of thousands of Republican victims of Spain's 1936-39 civil war and the four decades of dictatorship that followed under Franco, who died in 1975.

The centrepiece of this effort is his government's plans to exhume Franco's remains from a vast mausoleum drilled into the side of a mountain at the Valley of the Fallen near Madrid to a more discreet spot. 

READ MORE: Spain's new government vows to exhume Franco


What to do with the Valley of the Fallen? Photo: AFP

Franco, whose Nationalist forces defeated the Republicans in the war, dedicated the site to “all the fallen” of the conflict in an attempt at reconciliation.

But only two graves are marked – those of Franco and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the far-right Falangist party which supported Franco.    

Franco's relatives are fighting the planned exhumation in the courts.   

The 2007 “Historical Memory” law, which was approved by a previous Socialist administration, is aimed at giving greater recognition to victims on both sides of the civil war, which was triggered by Franco's rebellion against an elected Republican government.

But the conservative Popular Party cut funding for its implementation when it came to power in 2011. The PP and other conservative parties argue the law unnecessarily digs up wounds of the past.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

TODAY IN FRANCE

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

France has paved the way towards paying reparations to more relatives of Algerians who sided with France in their country's independence war but were then interned in French camps.

Published: 16 May 2023 08:29 CEST
France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

SHOW COMMENTS