crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
Civil War. Additionally, as a novelty, the law foresaw the acquisition of funds and narrations of oral
history.
The law did not satisfy several actors. To start with, several NGOs criticised it because of its limited
reach and timid attitude. Victims, intellectuals and leftist parties shared these views. On the other side of
spectrum, similar critical stances were adopted by the conservative forces and intellectuals, as well as
the Catholic Church which, in an unprecedented manoeuvre, beatified 498 priest killed by Republican
forces on 27 October in coincidence with the parliamentary process of the bill.
In parallel, some other initiatives had been carried through either by the Autonomous Communities
(for instance, in 2005, the Andalusia government created the figure of the Commissariat for the
Recovery of Historical Memory) or civil society NGOs (thus, in Valencia, a number of NGOs created a
Commission of Truth with regional reach). 12 This shows that the initiative was deemed insufficient but
also that it triggered further claims.
5. Issues to be extracted from the Spanish experience
5.1. Purpose of the exercise
Spain has not faced an official fact finding and truth exercise (the removal of misleading historical
accounts), which has been nevertheless the object of intense and passionate academic and political
debates. One of the difficulties revealed by the Spanish process is that, in divided societies, an aspiration
may exist to expel lies and false accounts from the history. However, interpretations may reconstruct
the sense of facts and it seems a priori difficult to obtain a consensus on what truth is. The language of
“truth” seems to posit difficulties. It seems that the moral value assigned to the facts linked to truth may
be perceived as highly superior to facts with no consideration of truth (without their falseness being
established). Hence, the exercise is more a competence for gaining recognition for own accounts.
The axis of the Spanish experience has focused by and large on the reparation of victims.
Recognition has had a more timid presence and what victims have consistently demanded is, precisely,
recognition. As an example, oral history (the recollection of oral accounts) has come to the agenda only
a very late stage.
Likewise, identification of perpetrators has not played a central role (or even, no role at all) in the
Spanish process. Despite foreign involvement, the origin and development of crimes is linked to Spanish
perpetrators, no different in nationality, race or any other “distinctive” feature. Large involvement at
several levels made that any process may potentially affect large sectors of society.
5.2. The difficulty of common history
What the Spanish experience shows is, precisely, the enormous difficulty of providing a common
understanding of history. At the European level, this requires a proper integration of all regimes and
situations which could have breach the basic values of the EU (democracy, respect for human rights,
rule of law, etc.). If at the more sophisticated level of academic accounts there may be great difficulties,
these are even greater to generate narratives popularly shared. To put an example, some of the disputes
features of Spanish authoritarian regime (such as anticommunism) may not be regarded so negatively
when facing other historical contexts.
5.3. Scope
Basically, processes of transitional justice are within given nation states and communities. If the
process becomes an inter-state one, several difficulties may appear. One specific problem for defining a
broad European process is the temporal and geographical scope, since are the victims the one that with
their claim primarily identify these. In European history, several processes could be included within
the mechanism of transitional justice. Thus, colonization affects several European countries. Also,
12
El País, 10 February 2007.
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