2013/01/05

Understanding Nothing

I've been thinking for days about something I can call nothing but yet another provocation by the Spanish government. Laws are not improvised, they take months to draft, and if rushed final provisions are added, the botch is more obvious than ever.

Spanish Education Minister Wert's team must think we are really ignorant if they think we are not going to notice that little detail and that the addition was made just after the polls, and as of the very election night scrutiny the Spanish governing Popular Party has been trying to weaken the concept of the Catalan nation and everything that identifies it.

This time they have wounded what is most sensitive and, at the same time, what has received the greatest collective support, even since before the recovery of devolution: our own language.

For over thirty years there has been a broad consensus for the defence of Catalan, which is not simply the official language, but has since the nineteen-eighties also been legally termed Catalonia's own idiosyncratic language, establishing the system of linguistic immersion as the method of normalising the language without separating children depending on their families' linguistic origin, apartheid style, thus maintaining Catalans a single people. The system has worked without any problems, and wanting to destroy this important asset is to understand nothing about the work done, opening a fracture between families.

If we want everyone to understand Catalan, so no one can demand we change our own language when we speak it in our own country, if we want it to achieve its true condition of official language, we must continue with methods of special protection, because the background we come from, of contempt and prohibition of the language, and because it is one of our historical rights.

Mr. Wert's proposed bill is contrary to the Spanish Constitution, which demands administrations protect and promote the languages of their territories, and it is contrary to the Catalan Statute and the European Charter for Languages. Creating problems where there are none, breaking consensus, and attempting to go back against a process of normalisation that is still far from complete, is to understand nothing.

To think that our educational system should go without one of its most prized instruments, praised worldwide, is to understand nothing. Substituting a dual track language school for the cohesive Catalan School and trying to destroy the system of coexistence that all of us have decided on with the support of all the political forces in Parliament, is to understand nothing.

Those who do not understand what they are governing, should not continue doing so, and those responsible for education in a compound multi-cultural and multi-lingual state are obliged to know the models of each territory that make up the historical nations as they have decided, and they should respect it. If they don't know how, they cannot be ministers, and if they do know how and notwithstanding the positive results still want to destroy them, they shouldn't be ministers either.

You cannot try to create a separate, apartheid “Spanish community” within Catalonia, and you cannot break our coexistence to weaken us as a nation. If you do, you are using children for political gain, of your party or of your ideology, and we will not allow it. Because that would not be to understand nothing, it would be dynamiting our most sensitive differential character: our own language, Catalan.

About the author of this article for Help Catalonia:
Montserrat Tura

Minister of Justice of Catalonia (2006-2010)
Minister of Home Affairs of Catalonia (2003-2006)
Mayoress of Mollet del Vallès (1997-2003)
From the same author:

1 comentaris:

  • anton says:
    5 de gener del 2013, a les 4:45

    ...!!*!!, such Lady might feel she is catalan, but she belongs to a political party the PSC which defends the union with the spaniards, so for me have no credibility, of course she is right with what she says, but it does not help us catalonians, nevertheless, the best will be first to joint the cause of 'Catalonia new state in Europe, and after such comments will not be necessary.

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