Every other day there is news of another mass grave found in Spain. These findings coincide with a resurgence of the divisions that lead to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the following for decades of dictatorship under general Franco. As families exhume the bodies of those killed during and after the conflict, and the grandchildren of the victims push for justice, Spaniards have started asking themselves if they made the right decision when they decided to impose forgiveness from the past, instead of confronting it. Explaining what has gone wrong with Spain could help other countries in their transitions and/or dealing with the aftermath of civil conflicts: 

Amnesty or Amnesia? 

After the death of the general Franco in 1975, Spain left behind four decades of dictatorship and repression to embrace democracy. It neither tried to held the old regime responsible for its actions nor established a Truth Commission to comfort its victims. The Spanish 1977 Amnesty Law, still in place, shielded any Franco era crimes from being put under trial. Victims have never been compensated. Ministers and officials from the Franco Government (1939-1975) were allowed to participate in politics. Monuments honoring the dictator are still standing in cities and town all over the country.

The main reason for burying the past was the fear of reviving the divisions that caused the Spanish Civil War. For a time, it all seems to work as the country developed and economic boom improved the lives of most people. But under the surface, the path chosen by Spain had created a silent resentment that grew over the years within the families of the more than 120.000 leftist that died or disappeared under Franco´s rule. In times of crisis, these old wound have reappeared.

Justice: better late than never?

The relatives of the victims felt that everything could change when in 2007 the socialist government introduced the law of “historical memory”. It recognized the victims of the Franco regime, removed some of the monuments that still honored the dictator and compensated some of the victims. The government started to assist families who wanted to exhume their loves ones from the 2,000 mass graves found. Judge Baltasar Garrison named more than 30 members of Franco regime as instigators of alleged crimes against humanity. But the push for justice stalled when the public prosecutor argued that Spain’s Amnesty Law did not permit the investigation.

The debate that followed stoked ancient hatreds, in part because the two main political parties in the country are historically related to both sides of the conflict, and are willing to use these old wounds for political gains. The standoff raised several questions: is it possible to seek justice for crimes committed decades ago, when most of the perpetrators are dead or very old? Can a country as divided as Spain find justice by itself? Or should it delegate the task on foreign and independent institutions?

Human rights have no boundaries

Last year, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances decided to intervene in the case of Spain, giving the current Spanish Government 90 days to explain how it is going to help the victims of Franco’s regime. It issued 42 recommendation for “a comprehensive, coherent and permanent state policy” that would allow relatives of those who disappeared to know what happened to them and give proper burials to the victims. What the UN was saying, in other words, is that Spain has failed its victims. As in the case of the Cambodian genocide of the 70´s, the question of outside assistance has been raised.

The comparison with Cambodia may seem exaggerated, but no so in the eyes of Amnesty International. The NGO ranks Spain only second after the Asian country in the number of people disappeared. It was precisely the inability of the Cambodian System to undertake an independent and fair trial that lead to the composition of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), commonly known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. The process, in which a mix of Cambodian and foreign judges tried five aging former communist leaders, has been widely described as a failure. But it some villages I visited while the trial was being televised, something meaningful was happening. When perpetrators of the genocide and victims crossed paths, it wasn’t the former that had to turn around. The shame, in many cases, had started to shift.

Time to stop the circle of hatred

In a recent visit to a university in the South Spain I was struck by how students referred to each other as “fachas” y “rojos”, the terms that defined the right and left sides during the Civil War. Of course none of these students had endured the conflict, but they had inherited the grievances from previous generations. It seemed clear to me that Spain has to do something to brake this vicious circle, and that some kind of assistance from the outside was needed. It might be too late for a trial, but not for a Truth Commission in which independent investigators and historias settle the responsibilities, and give those affected by the war and the Franco regime a final place to rest.

The war on drugs, launched in its modern version by Richard Nixon in 1971, and still presented as a success by it supporters, has failed to reduce consumption in the US or diminish the business of the drug cartels. It has increased drug related crime, provoked an explosion of incarcerations in the developed world and aggravated conflicts in different parts of the world, as the example of Mexico clearly shows. Aren’t we repeating the mistakes of the years of alcohol prohibition, in a much bigger scale?

Five charts suggests that a new approach is needed and could have a bigger chance to work. It would have to include the legalization and regulation of drugs and the allocation of the billions spent today in “warcotics” in addiction treatment, crop alternatives in countries were drugs are produced and tobacco like health campaigns to educate people on the dangers of drug consumption.

The 18th Amendment of 1917 brought an era of national prohibition of alcohol in America. But those who wanted to drink always found a way to do it, feeding the underground world and its crime networks. The war on drugs and the tough laws of the last decades have also done little to stop consumption. The graphic shows that the increase in spending on the war on drugs has had little effect on the number of addicts.

Since Nixon launched the war on drugs, the number of people incarcerated in the US has skyrocketed. There is not a single study that suggest this policy of punishing small traffickers and in some cases consumers has reduced either the trade or the addiction rates.

Data show, on the contrary, that the current drug policies have increased crime related to the drug trade. This is specially true in the black communities hit by gang violence.

$50,000,000,000. This is what the US spends on its fight against drugs on a yearly basis. This graphic shows that not even in the countries where Washington has thousands of soldiers deployed, this offensive against narcotics is working. Mexico is another example where the failure of the US policy is having a great impact, with increasing violence and crime related to narcotics.

So what has worked? Taxing, regulation and prevention. In the case of tobacco, all of these factors have contributed to reduce consumption in the US. Teen smoking rates have been declining since 1997. While regulation and taxes made sure that the government (not the crime gangs) profited from the tobacco trade, prevention campaigns have made tobacco less appealing. 

Vladimir, a Nieman fellow at Harvard, was impacted as a person, and shaped as a journalist, by his experience of the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 90´s. He grew up living the disintegration of his country, the NATO bombing of his hometown and the stigma associated with a nation that has always been blamed in the West for causing the conflict, and its worst abuses.

I was curious to know more about Vladimir´s experience on those days, and how it influenced the journalist he is now. But instead of asking him directly, I decided to present to him images of what took place two decades earlier and have him react to them. The pictures are the questions. This is how he responded: 

A young Serbian leader, Milosevic, gives a speech after becoming Communist Party head in 1987.

“Milosevic was raising in the ranks of the Communist party and he seized the opportunity during a visit to Kosovo to rally the minority serbs living there. Some people complained that they had been beaten by Albanians. That´s when he said his famous sentence: “No one will ever dare beat you again!”. It was a build up to what would become the war. At the time I was finishing elementary school. I was 14. I don´t recall having a clear sense of what was happening, but I knew there was something strange going on in Kosovo.”

Belongings of Srebrenica massacre victims litter a road after the mass execution of men and boys. It was the massacre that symbolized the war and portrayed the serbian army.

“One of the worst atrocities of the war.  It was the summer of 1995 and I was 21. There were many things happening at the time. It was a very tense period of the war with all sides pushing their offensives. Bosnian serb general Ratko Mladic entered Srebrenica, took away women and children and executed the men and the boys 16 years and up. I did not witness was happened in Srebrenica, it was difficult to access and cover war crimes at the time.

For me, the most impressive scene [I witnessed] from this period, the most dramatic, was in August 95. There was a huge column of people, Serbians from Croatia, and they were coming to Belgrade through the highway on tractors. Serbian police blocked all the exits so the people could not enter the center of the city. This was very emotional because all these people had been expelled from their homes and had travelled for days, and had been attacked by the Croatian army. I think early on the war the roles were set and the West and Western media blamed everything on serbs, but the fact is that there were war crimes committed by all sides.”

“It is incredible that it was in Bosnia, a place were people once believed in the unity and brotherhood of Yugoslavia, that most of the war crimes were committed. It is sad that people who are part of one nation can fight like that and keep people behind a wire fence and without food. There were terrible crimes committed, specially in Easter Bosnia.”

The attacks on Serbia started on March 24, 1999, bombing lasted 79 days and resulted in at least 2,500 deaths and more than 12,500 injuries.

“Actually this (Vladimir points to the building on the right) is my parent´s home and it is were we live now. At the time I was working for NBC News and I was looking at the scene from the other side. I remember I was shaking because this (Vladimir points to the explosion in the picture) was just 500 meters from my parent´s home. I called them on the phone to tell them to evacuate the building immediately. It was 1999, and they had hit a heating plant, and you could see flames at least 100 meters high. I thought my parents and my sister were in danger, but later I found they were OK.

I still think this bombing was unfair. Wester media and politicians claimed that this was a humanitarian intervention, when in fact NATO bombs were mostly killing civilians. There was no legal or moral justification for such and act. It was about helping Kosovo Albanians to win the war. Hundred of thousands of people were displaced and at least 5.000 died in all sides.”

Press clip from the war coverage. Serbs always felt it was bias against them.

“I think the Western media sided with the Bosnian and Croatian early in the war because Serbia was perceived a a communist relic and a country with ties to Russia. It was easy for reporters and media in general to get into this mindset of white and black, good and bad. Almost no Western journalist took the time to analyze what was going on. I think it is also because these reporters tend to trust their governments and some of these governments had an agenda in Yugoslavia.

I don’t think I would have been a journalist if it was not for the war. I felt so helpless, with all these forces that you cannot influencie, and I think journalism was a way out of this helplessness for me. By reporting I could at least do something and try to make a difference.”

Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, left, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, center, and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, right, initial the peace agreement after 21 days of talks at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, Tuesday, Nov. 21, 1995. (AP/ Longstreath)

“This is a picture of the presidents of Serbia (Miloseviv), Bosnia (Izetbegovic) and Croatia (Tudjam), all very dubious persons that signed the Bosnian Peace accords: Milosevic was a staunch communist, Izetbegovic an islamic fundamentalist and Tudjam became a nationalist bordering fascism. When I saw this I was glad that the war would end, but I was skeptical on how this would wok out knowing these guys. This year it will mark the 20th anniversary of the signing of the deal and Bosnia is still an unfinished country without real democracy. I would have preferred that we could have kept Yugoslavia as a country, in some sort of union.

At the time of the war I thought they were all to blame, and we as a nation too. Now I see that the main reason for the war was the luck of institutions in Yugoslavia, democratic and accountable institutions that should have given voice to all people in the country.”

From war to the future: an image of a project for the city of Belgrade.

“Politicians in Serbia are very accustomed to fairy tales and this is just one more. They say they will turn Belgrade into the Dubai of souther Europe, but for something like this to happen Serbia will need to invest al least two billion dollar that it does not have, so this will remain a fairy tell.

One of the legacies of the war is very weak institutions, not just in Serbia but in all former Yugoslavia. When politicians seize power they try to have all the power in their hands and not try to develop institutions. This will be the main challenge for the future, to build independent minded people who will create strong institutions. I don’t think there will be any dramatic events as those we lived 20 years ago, but there is still a long way. I think there is some nationalism, but young people from all these countries communicate much better than my generation did. They share interests, and they have found a better way to understand each other.”

A not very scientific (or sophisticated) comparison of what a week of news consumption looked for me last week, a week in 2008 and a week in 2000.  MediaDiary

Best,

David