International justice begins at home

Carlos Alberto Montaner
Miami Herald, August 4, 2003

MADRID -- This summer is turning out to be hotter than expected. One book, Checas de Madrid, is contributing to the rising temperature in selling out five printings in less than five weeks. It was written by César Vidal, a prodigious author often compared to the late Isaac Asimov.

Checas was the name given by Spain's republicans to the quarters of the political police that existed during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939.) They were patterned after the Soviet model and were brought to Spain by the Communist Party, along with numerous Soviet advisors experienced in gutting foes.

Soon, almost all political and labor organizations sympathetic to the republican government had their own checas. In Madrid alone, Vidal identifies 226 of them, many set up in old convents and even in churches seized from the Catholics.

What was done in those sinister detention centers? The detainees were savagely tortured, especially in the communist checas, where victims were accused of being accomplices of fascism and often killed.

The book ends with a ghastly list of 11,705 people killed -- in Madrid alone. The nationwide total of victims of republican repression, profusely documented, amounts to 110,965. In that grim roster, nearly 7,000 are priests, nuns and members of religious orders.

True, in the territory held by Francisco Franco and his nationalists, blood also flowed in streams. Moreover, for at least five years after the defeat of the republicans, Franco mercilessly brought down his iron fist on the backs of the vanquished, probably exceeding the number of those executed by the Republic.

But that doesn't alter reality: In Spain, particularly in the capital, the political police, in the name of ''progressive'' ideas, tortured and killed thousands of people, without the slightest vestige of legality.

What relevance can events that happened more than 60 years ago have today? A great deal, because at the same time that Vidal published his shocking investigation, Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón was requesting the extradition of 46 Argentine military officers accused of torturing and killing thousands of people in their country during its last military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983.

Why does Spanish justice concern itself with crimes committed on the other side of the Atlantic and not hunt down the killers living, in impunity and contentment, on national soil just a few yards away from the competent courts?

Federico Jiménez Losantos, one of Spain's most listened-to -- and most feared -- journalists asked that question bluntly during his hour-long radio program: ''Why doesn't Baltasar Garzón order the arrest and trial of communist Santiago Carrillo, the man directly responsible for the murder of 2,800 people in a single weekend; or Serrano Suñer, a key member of the Franco regime, who was responsible, albeit indirectly, for a great many of the abuses committed by his government?'' Could it be because they are very old? That's not a good juridical argument.

The Spaniards made their transition to democracy a quarter of a century ago forgetting the crimes committed against each other during the Civil War. Even though in 1978 -- when a new constitution officially ended the Franco regime -- hundreds of thousands of Civil War combatants were still alive, many of them victims, many of them killers.

LACKING MORAL STRENGTH

What moral strength does that society have to try alleged Argentine criminals if it doesn't do the same with its own? As long as those questions are not cleared, the United States or any other responsible country acts correctly by not submitting itself to international criminal courts.

The probability that such courts will dispense justice is less than that they will bog down in demagoguery and politicization. During the recent war in Iraq, for example, the dean of a Madrid university -- no less a professor of constitutional law, afflicted with sectarianism -- called for the international prosecution of Spain's President José María Aznar as a war criminal for supporting Washington during the conflict.

In the end, this is a gray zone filled with uncertainty.

August 4, 2003