Catalan politicians protest at alleged sabre-rattling

Catalan Interior Minister Felip Puig has asked the Defence Ministry to explain what he says are unusual low-level flights by air force fighters in the latest complaint over alleged sabre-rattling since the northeastern region's president called last month for a referendum over independence.


Earlier this week, four Catalan MPs sitting in the European Parliament asked the European Union to "assess the real risks of possible military action in Catalonia."

This follows army Colonel Francisco Alamán telling a right-wing website that Catalonia would be independent "over my dead body", while another Colonel, Leopoldo Muñoz Sánchez -- who is president of the Spanish Military Association -- reportedly told DutchTV "Our point of view is that a state of war shouldbe declared" in case Catalonia should look like breaking away from Spain.

Spain's central government noted Alamán is retired (as is Muñoz Sánchez), and declined to comment, while the opposition Socialist leader said the European MPs' letter was "absolutely mistaken".

That the debate can be held at all tells us this is a country which has seen 50 coups d'état in the past two centuries, whereas the possibility of military plots to topple governments is so remote for English-speakers that we have to borrow a French term to describe it.

Spain has come a long way since it last faced a coup since 1981, which failed, and even further since the Civil War began with a military uprising in 1936.

However, 1981 was not quite like 1981. To viewers abroad at the time (including myself) Lieutenant-Colonel Tejero may have looked ridiculous as he stormed Parliament in his three-cornered tin hat, but several MPs his followers kidnapped at the time thought they would be taken outside and shot, something they had all seen happpen many times before.

Journalists tell me they also feared for their lives and their names were on a hit list of public figures published after the coup, and most media outlets were silent apart from daily newspaper El País, which rushed out an emergency edition to condemn the plot. Businesses and restaurants all closed and people stayed indoors, waiting to see what would happen.

Spain's fledgling democracy withstood the 23 February coup (known simply as 23-F in Spain), its first real threat, and joined the European Community in 1986.

Times have changed and today's army no longer has senior officers remotely like the leading 23-F conspirators Alfonso Armada and Jaime Milans del Bosch, who had not only fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of future dictator Francisco Franco, but also volunteered to fight on the Russian front in the Second World War alongside Nazi Germany's troops, as part of Spain's "Blue Division".

Even in 1936, when military interference in politics was taken for granted, the military uprising failed in its immediate aim to take over the country quickly. Half of Spain remained loyal to the government and the plotters took nearly three years to prevail in a civil war which killed half a million, and that with the help of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Again, times have changed.

The last successful military takeover of government in Spain was back in 1923 by Gen. Miguel Primo de Rivera, with the connivance of then King Alfonso XIII, so I doubt many analysts would seriously entertain the possibility of a successful coup today, or even of an attempted plot given the failure of 23-F.

Still,  in a country where every one has at least one relative who died in the Civil War -- hundreds of thousands of them in blood-letting far from the front lines -- where more than a hundred thouand still lie in unmarked graves and every one over the age of 37 has personal experience of dictatorship, perhaps it is not surprising that some will prefer to err on the side of caution.