MADRID, Oct 2, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on
Tuesday rapped Catalonia’s separatist leader Quim Torra for “encouraging
radicals” a day after clashes erupted in Barcelona on the anniversary of a
banned independence referendum.
Hundreds of pro-independence protesters knocked down barriers at the
entrance of the regional parliament late Monday evening, provoking clashes
with police and forcing the leader in Catalonia of anti-secession party
Ciudadanos to leave the building under escort.
The clashes topped a restive day in the northeastern region, where radical
activists, many of them hooded, cut roads and railway lines on the one-year
anniversary of the referendum, encouraged by Torra, who earlier in the day
had applauded their form of street pressure.
“President Torra must abide by his responsibilities and not endanger
political normalisation by encouraging radicals to lay siege to institutions
which represent all Catalans,” Sanchez said in a tweet in his first reaction
to the sensitive anniversary.
“Violence isn’t the way forward.”
Catalonia’s independence referendum on October 1, 2017 was marred by a
violent police crackdown on polling stations in footage that went around the
world.
A year later, the tables turned with images of radical independence
supporters cutting roads and railway lines, muscling their way into a
government building and clashing with police, making headlines in Spain.
Even former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, who is in self-exile in
Belgium after last October’s secession bid, condemned the violence.
“If they are hooded they’re not from the 1-0,” he tweeted in reference to
the referendum last year, which eventually led to a short-lived unilateral
declaration of independence on October 27.
That prompted then prime minister Mariano Rajoy to sack the regional
government, dissolve the Catalan parliament and call snap local elections.
“If they use violence they’re not from the 1-0. We did it with our faces
uncovered and in a peaceful way.”