Such a sadly worsening situation in Spain. Whoever started fueling the dream of independence, they don't seem to have a plan for after the referendum...
British friends, reminds you of something?
Now the Spanish government will have to authorize a legal vote for everyone in Catalonia, but what will come next? Do people realise that they are not going to become a magically happy nation just because they throw the other Spaniards out...? What kind of future are they building for themselves?
Odd, scary times in Europe.
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Catalonia: hundreds of thousands join anti-independence rally in Barcelona
Police say 350,000 have protested against regional government’s separatist course, but organisers say 930,000 joined in
Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets of Barcelona to protest against the Catalan government’s decision to push for independence, as Spain’s prime minister warned that he was prepared to suspend the region’s autonomy to stop it splitting from the rest of the country.
Sunday’s rally – organised by Societat Civil Catalana, the region’s main pro-unity organisation – comes a week after the independence referendum that has plunged Spain into its worst political crisis in four decades.
The march, whose slogan is “Let’s recover our common sense”, was intended to call for a new phase of dialogue with the rest of Spain and featured such luminaries as the Nobel-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and Josep Borrell, former president of the European parliament.
Societat Civil Catalan said as many as 930,000 people had taken part, but Barcelona police put the turnout at 350,000.
The Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, is under growing pressure to stop short of declaring independence. The political uncertainty has already led some businesses – including Spain’s third-largest bank – to move their bases from Catalonia.
According to the Catalan government, 90% of participants voted for independence in the referendum, 7.8% voted against and almost 2% of ballot papers were left blank.
Puigdemont is due to appear in the Catalan parliament on Tuesday to “report on the current political situation” and to put the referendum results to MPs.
The move – seen as an attempt to circumvent the Spanish constitutional court’s ban on a similar session scheduled for Monday – could potentially provide an opportunity for the region’s promised unilateral declaration of independence.
(...)
Despite the Spanish authorities’ efforts to stop the referendum, 2.3 million of Catalonia’s 5.3 million registered voters took part, although many Catalans who oppose independence boycotted the poll for fear of lending it legitimacy.
A full count of the votes has been complicated by the fact that police removed many ballot boxes from polling stations. The regional government said police had shut down polling stations where up to 770,000 people could have voted.
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Meanwhile, the Kurdish people of Iraq have been fighting for their independence for decades and they are facing the consequences of 20 years of war and political turmoil, plus ISIS...
The Catalans are mainly angry about the past dictatorship of Franco. But it is indeed... in the past.
Typical situation of double standards in European newspapers and mainly on social media.
Here is a column that can help understand Kurdish needs. Tough many Middle East's experts fear the current power in Erbil is just reinforcing its grips on the region...
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I was in Kurdistan last year, for the first time, with an international NGO sending doctors in conflit zones. I'm no one to take side but I wish readers in Europe could pay more attention to the rest of the world. Maybe they would stop fostering their own divisions with choice like the Brexit and the Catalan referendums...
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The Kurds desperately want freedom – why won’t the free world support them?
"It’s time to end this forced marriage to post-Saddam Iraq"
Friday 29 September 2017 14.23 BST
Despite the huge international pressure to postpone or cancel the independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan, it went ahead and 92% voted yes, with a 72% turnout. We Kurds are the largest “nationality” in the world without our own nation – and we were not going to be deterred from having our say.
There are roughly 40 million of us distributed among Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey after the collapse of the Ottoman empire – the victims of the secret Sykes-Picot agreement between the French and British authorities in 1916, which was confirmed at the San Remo conference in 1920.
After the Kuwait crisis in 1991, the Kurds in Iraq enjoyed some kind of “empirical sovereignty” – the right to defend their own areas – and “positive sovereignty”, managing to deliver public services to the citizens. In 1992 they held their first parliamentary elections, and agreed to be part of a future federal Iraq. After the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Kurds voluntarily took part in building the new Iraq and its institutions, under the protection of the Kurdish peshmerga troops – the only organised armed force in the immediate aftermath of 2003. In 2005 all Iraqis, including the Kurds, agreed on a federal constitution to preserve the rights of all.
But now, after 14 years of post-Saddam Iraq, Kurds believe that our time has come to end that forced marriage to Iraq. The dominant narrative in Kurdistan is that during the first Iraqi republic – between 1921 and 2003 – our people were gassed, bombed, displaced and ethnically cleansed; and now, during this second republic, we are deprived of a proper budget to manage our own affairs, while our political rights are violated.
Among the nearly 55 constitutional articles violated by the federal government is article 140, which deals with disputed areas of the country, including Kirkuk. Kurds also believe that Iraq is in danger of losing sovereignty to Iran, and that it is increasingly becoming a religious state, rather than the civil state agreed on in the constitution. At the same time, the rise of Islamic State and the establishment of the Shia Popular Mobilisation Forces are persistent threats to the region’s security. Being part of “one Iraq” has been an expensive business that Kurds can no longer afford.
Opposition to the Kurdish referendum seems to have brought together rival actors for the first time in the history of the region. Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, the US, the UK and Isis all came out against it: they’ve never agreed on anything before. Baghdad says the referendum is not constitutional. However, the federal government’s violation of the constitution is what has paved the way for the dissolution of the country.
The US and its allies say that the referendum would affect the war against Isis. This argument is also weak. The peshmerga are ready to defend the areas under their control. Isis is operating near Kurdish areas, there’s an obvious strategic interest for Kurds to defeat them – that’s not going to change with independence. Kurdish officials have repeatedly assured Washington and Baghdad of their commitment. They are prepared to fight Isis alongside Iraqi forces in Hawija near Kirkuk.
It should not be a surprise to see democratic governments opposing this democratic referendum – we are seeing the same thing in Catalonia too. But was it not only a few years ago that the US and the UK waged a war supposedly to spread democracy in Iraq? This fresh rejection cannot be described as anything other than a form of neo-colonialism, in which the voice of oppressed people is forcefully muted.
The result of the Kurdish referendum reflects a popular demand. The free world should stop taking sides, and instead help Erbil and Baghdad to achieve a peaceful solution. Instead of insulting democracy, they should respect the will of the Iraqi Kurds. They should value the sacrifices our people have made in the fight against Isis by addressing the grievances that we have had for over a century now. I think Abraham Lincoln said it best: “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”
• Amjed Rasheed is a research fellow at the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Durham University
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