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Spain pledges to ramp up search for Franco victim graves

Spain's leftist government approved a draft bill Tuesday which will finance the exhumation of victims of the country's 1936-39 civil war and the Franco dictatorship from hundreds of mass graves.

Spain pledges to ramp up search for Franco victim graves
Exhuming the remains of victims executed by Franco's security forces during Spain's civil war, Archive photo: AFP

Campaigners estimate more than 100,000 victims from the war and its aftermath remain buried in unmarked graves across Spain – a figure, according to Amnesty International, only exceeded by Cambodia.

The so-called “Law on Democratic Memory” which Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's cabinet approved Tuesday will make unearthing the mass graves a “state responsibility”.

The bill, which still has to be approved by parliament, will also create a DNA database to help identify remains found in the mass graves and prevent publicly-funded institutions from glorifying the dictatorship.    

The government will set aside €750,000 ($890,000) to finance the bill in 2020, with 60 percent earmarked for the search for the missing.   

“Memory, justice and reparation must be state matters. Today we take another step in recognising the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship with the Law on Democratic Memory. Today we close the wounds a little bit more and can look at the past with greater dignity,” Sanchez tweeted.   

Under an earlier historical memory law passed by a previous socialist government in 2007, the state simply offered support to help families trace and exhume relatives buried in unmarked graves.   

But that support was withdrawn after the conservative Popular Party came to power in 2011, claiming it needlessly opened old wounds.   

Sanchez has made the rehabilitation of the victims of the era of dictator Francisco Franco one of his priorities since coming to power in 2018.   

Last year he had Franco's remains removed from a vast basilica in the Valley of the Fallen near Madrid where he was buried when he died in 1975, and transferred to a discreet family plot in El Pardo cemetery on the outskirts of the Spanish capital.

The bill approved Tuesday calls for Franco's former mausoleum at the Valley of the Fallen to be turned into an educational site about the war and the dictatorship. It will also annul the criminal convictions of opponents of the dictatorship.

Franco assumed power after the civil war in which his Nationalists defeated Republicans, leaving the country in ruins and mourning hundreds of thousands of dead.   

While Franco's regime honoured its own dead, it left its opponents buried in unmarked graves scattered across the country.

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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.

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.

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