Salamanca Documents Not Yet Returned

After years of non-compliance, the Spanish Minister of Culture promised that the Spanish State would return to Catalonia, by 30th June 2012, all the documents that were looted by Spain during the war and stored at the Spanish Civil War Archive in Salamanca. Months after this deadline, the documents that belong to individuals and to private organizations and were meant to be sent to the Catalan government never made it back. It seems history will repeat itself as with the previous shipment promised by the Spanish Minister of Culture under Spanish president Zapatero, when everything was ready for the return of the documents and the Spanish administration stopped the shipment.

Yet hundreds of boxes full of documents are pending return. For this reason, when on the 26th of April the Spanish Minister of Culture told his Catalan peer that the documents, filed as “war booty” in the General Spanish Civil War Archive in Salamanca, would be returned before the 30th of June, we breathed a sigh of relief.

After facing year after year of non-compliance and delays, Mr. Wert's words were welcome. In this context, it must be taken into account that the last Minister of Culture, a member of the PSOE socialist cabinet, showed her willingness to make true the return of the documents that were digitalised before the dissolution of the Spanish Parliament in October (including some 86.000 images of documents, 225 boxes). With this apparent willingness to return the documents, it seemed that Article 2 of Law 21/2005, which compels the return within a maximum period of 3 months after identification, would be fulfilled.

However, the Socialist Government finally failed to complete the return. (Sources at the Ministry of Culture were interested in informing me that it was not the Minister, who had already hired the transport agency, but the Prime Minister who was responsible for not fulfilling the commitment).

 

 

Several months have passed since Mr. Wert made his commitment, but the return has not been forthcoming. He says that positively everything will be returned, but the months go by, adding disdain to delay, considering that these are documents owned by individuals and legal entities that are awaiting them and are to receive them once the documents are in the hands of the Generalitat. I say disdain, but this is an understatement. If we take into account the significance of the return, long reclaimed by Catalan society, these are documents that belong to citizens that have been waiting for them for for a very long time, for personal, family, emotional or patrimonial reasons.

And this not the end of the affair. We had succeeded initially in including in the law of 2005 the return of confiscated documents belonging to the Government of Catalonia and to individual persons, but not the documents taken from municipalities in Catalonia and Valencia, and these were left out. So far all attempts at getting these back have failed. But we will try and try again, most of all since some town and city councils (Barcelona, Igualada, Moià, Reus, Sant Joan les Fonts, Sort, Gandesa, Tarragona, Valls, Vic, Sallent, Sant Cugat del Vallès, Vilanova de Segrià, and Vilanova i La Geltrú) have claimed them. Although the Spanish administration is denying their return, that does not mean that they do not incur in contradictions that weakens their position, as the Minister of Culture returned to Barcelona City Council on July 29, 2010 documents confiscated with the same repressive will that was seen at the archive of the old dictatorial “Civil (as proposed to Military) Government”. The fact is that the Spanish Government keeps refusing, saying that the law does not contemplate it, while ignoring that the Catalan Statute (Article 2) recognises that the Generalitat (the Catalan Government) legally consists of all the Catalan institutions, including Municipalities.

On Wednesday, the Culture Commission of the Spanish Congress will once again discuss (debate and vote), at the request of the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), the immediate return of the documents still pending and the opening of discussions on the documents from the municipalities.

Joan Tardà

Member of the Spanish Parliament