CATALONIA
Jonathan Cook,journalist
Former British ambassador Craig Murray has been writing a string of
posts on his blog about what is happening in Spain that makes for
disturbing reading.
He has been especially shocked at the
response of the EU Commission. He believes that, in publicly giving its
full backing to Spain's prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, the Commission
has effectively set the stage for more violence from the Spanish
government against the Catalan people and their representatives.
Certainly, it cannot be a good sign that Spain's highly politicised
Constitutional Court has shut down the Catalan parliament, overriding
the democratic will of the Catalan people.
Murray, as someone
who spent many years in the senior diplomatic service, has a much better
idea than most of us how to read the significance of what can sound to
an outside observer like bland formulations of protocol.
Murray:
It takes a very special kind of chutzpah systematically to assault
voters, and drag them from polling booths by their hair, and then say
that a low turnout invalidates the vote. That is the shameless position
being taken by the Europe-wide political Establishment and its corporate
media lackeys. ...
The rule of law is not everything. Apartheid
was legally enforced in South Africa. ... British colonialism was
enforced by laws. Nor is the administration of the law always impartial.
Apartheid had its judges. Pinochet had judges to enact his version of
the “rule of law”.
Actually all dictators are very big on “the rule of law”.
The most sinister thing [EU Commissioner Frans] Timmermans said to the
European Parliament was: “There can be no human rights without the rule
of law”. Sinister because he did not balance it with “There can be no
rule of law without human rights”.
What Spain is attempting now
to impose on Catalonia is rule of law without democracy. I am going to
be most interested to see how Brussels manages to justify that. We are
seeing a whipping up of hatred by a central government against a
national and linguistic minority and a suppression of its freedoms and
institutions.
