Two anniversaries

It’s been a week of two sad anniversaries. One of them rather less painful than the other. But neither of them cheerful.

The Spanish have a curious habit of referring to key dates by just the day of the month and the capital letter of the month’s name. So ‘11M’ is the terrorist attack on a commuter train approaching Atocha station in Madrid. That leaves us guessing whether the day it happened was the eleventh of May (try again) or the eleventh of March (bingo). As for the year, I can only assume Spaniards have excellent memories and they just remember it was 2004.

The particular Spanish anniversary I’m thinking of, however, is 23F. The 23rd of  February. Which year? Well, you just have to develop a Spanish memory to know that it was 1981.

At twenty-three minutes past six in the evening of that day, a group of Guardia Civil paramilitary police, led by Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero, irrupted into the chamber of the lower house of the Spanish parliament. It was debating the appointment of a new Prime Minister so the whole government was present. As a result, the rebel police took hostage not just MPs but the entire administration.

February 1981. The late dictator of Spain, Francisco Franco, had been dead only just over four years, after a near four-decade dictatorship launched by the previous coup in July 1936 (18J, although oddly I’ve never heard it referred to that way). In 1981, Spain was still in its stumbling transition towards democracy, a process by no means certain of reaching its goal. 

A friend of mine in Barcelona once told me she and her friends spent that evening driving to each others’ houses for anxious conversations about what they should do and in how much danger they stood. Were they about to see Spanish democracy snuffed out again, they wondered, before it had even had the chance to take root?

Gran Via de Ferran el Catolíc
As I enjoy it today and as it was on 23F

I think of that terrible moment whenever I’m in one of the fine avenues of my local city, Valencia. That’s the Gran Vía de Fernán el Catolíc, broad, leafy, with gardens down the centre. It’s a pleasure to walk down. But on the night of 23F, in response to orders from the local military commander, Lieutenant General Jaime Milans del Bosch, it was lined with 50 tanks and 2000 soldiers, as the local garrison rose in support of the coup attempt. 

A fine Spanish poet, Jaime Gil de Biedma, once wrote that “of all sad histories in History, the saddest without doubt is the history of Spain, because it ends badly”. Well, it looked back then as though it was about to end badly on 23F too. But this time it didn’t.

At 1:00 in the morning, the king, Juan Carlos I, went on TV to order troops back to barracks. Even Milans del Bosch in Valencia, the only regional military chief to have risen so enthusiastically in support of the coup, recalled his forces. That didn’t save him from an eventual prison sentence, however. Tejero got an even longer one.

A matter of some controversy to this day remains what exactly the king was up to between the coup attempt and his TV address, nearly seven hours later. Was he ensuring that he had all the pieces in place to resist the insurrection? Or was he checking to see which side would win before committing himself?

Back then most people might have given him the benefit of the doubt. He emerged from the incident as the saviour of democracy. It became common for Spaniards to say that, though they might not be royalists, they were certainly Juan-Carlists. These days, following financial, sexual and lifestyle scandals that have forced him into abdication, Juan Carlos might, however, find the public less accommodating.

Still, democracy survived and the anniversary of 23F isn’t a bad one.

Much less cheerful is the one that fell the following day, 24 February, the first anniversary of Russia’s so-called ‘special operation’ in Ukraine. This week, as the day approached, Vladimir Putin announced that the fighting was all down to the aggression of NATO and Ukraine. Now, I admit I don’t follow the news closely enough, but I don’t recall any NATO forces being on Russian territory. No Ukrainian ones either, to be honest, unless he means the territory the Russian invaders occupied just long enough for Putin to deem it annexed to Russia, before the Ukrainians pushed them back out.

Putin reflects the outlook of only some Russians, though possibly a majority, in a nation bombarded by propaganda and with little access to independent news. There are other Russians with different views. I met one some weeks ago, a man who’d been tipped off that he was likely to be mobilised. That would have sent him to the meatgrinder for unfortunate soldiers which the Russian operation in Ukraine has become. He dropped everything, leaving work and family, to flee his homeland. Sadly, securing asylum abroad hasn’t proved easy: while Ukrainians are immediately viewed as refugees, Russians escaping the Putinocracy aren’t automatically extended the same kindness.

Street scene from Kharkiv during my 2011 visit when I met Alex
and after another strike in Putin’s ‘special operation’

Meanwhile, Ukrainians keep up their spirit of resistance. My friend Alex is from Kharkiv, one of those majority-Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine that Putin claims are longing to join the Russian motherland. With his city suffering Russian bombardment, Alex just finds it sickening:

… to see how KGB/FSB brainwashing techniques multiplied by modern technology have turned a whole nation [Russia] into a totalitarian sect… 

He likens them to residents of Jonestown, the sect most of whose members committed mass suicide in Guyana back in 1979. He points out that the Russians:

… send their loved ones to death or go to die themselves, because ‘Putin knows better’. 

What about the sustained bombardment of his city?

I still cannot grasp the fact that ordinary Russians are shelling our cities every night for absolutely no reason. That thought comes to my mind every time I hide in the bathroom when an air alarm goes off and there are sounds of explosions nearby (I mostly ignore alarms during the day because I am busy buying or delivering things for civilians or military, but we have a curfew from 23.00 to 5.00, and during that time my wife and I usually go to the bathroom during air alarms if we are not asleep)

The Ukrainians, he believes are different from the Russians:

… that comes from them, notwithstanding their various political views, living for 30 years in a free democratic society. Somehow 90+ percent of our people got a feeling that our only chance to survive is to stand united as Ukrainians. If Putin had any chance to present this as an ‘internal conflict amongst Russians’ we would have fallen already. But our President is very good at messaging, and him wearing a pullover ‘I'm Ukrainian’ tells it all. Sooner or later all of us started to believe in the idea of free independent democratic Ukraine, and that I think has brought the whole civilized world to our side

Every day I deliver aid to people in their eighties, some of them visually impaired or having problems walking, and they tell me that ‘Western tanks are coming to our rescue…’ One senior lady who lives alone has told me she lies on her back every time a Russian shelling starts, puts an icon on her chest and prays. But, she says, ‘Ukraine has not died yet!’

Those people make me so much stronger

Well, I hope Western tanks do make it to the Ukrainian armies in sufficient numbers and time to make a difference. Planes too. Ammunition. And the humanitarian aid a persecuted people needs.

Spanish history didn’t for once end badly on 23F. Now that we’re past the anniversary of what I suppose we can call 24F, I hope that we in the West will do enough to ensure that it doesn’t end badly for Ukraine either. Because the survival of Alex’s ‘free democratic society’, in the face of brutal and unprovoked aggression, matters far beyond Ukraine’s borders.