Nessie School of Languages

Learning languages in Amposta

23 de febrer de 2007
Sense categoria
3 comentaris

Oleguer Presas al The Guardian

Barcelona’s right-back philosopher out to make world a
better
place

Sid Lowe
Wednesday February 21, 2007
The
Guardian

A crowd gathers in the sunshine at the Camp Nou ,
hoping for
a glimpse of their heroes – a fleet of
luxury cars pulling away to cheering
and applause. A
BMW here, a Mercedes there, a Hummer, a Ferrari,
a
Porsche or two … and a van. Yes, a van. It is not
your typical
footballer’s car, but then the driver is
not your typical
footballer.

Oleguer Presas rejects suggestions that he’s different

and is uncomfortable with labels. Sitting in the
bowels of the Camp Nou
while he explains his beliefs
in a soft, thoughtful voice, it is apparent
that
facile descriptions do him little justice, but there’s
no escaping
the fact that he stands out – and not just
because of the beard. Instead,
Oleguer stands out
because he speaks out.

The Barça right-back is
a committed campaigner, an
economics graduate who contributes to cultural
and
political journals with carefully elaborated articles,
he supports
Catalan literacy crusades and Catalan
independence, and dedicated the only
goal of his
career to a fourteen year old from Sabadell who had
been
arrested for protesting against the mayor. He is
the author of a book called
Camí d’Itaca (The Road to
Ithaca ), which deals with everything from the
Franco
years to the war on terror and even anorexia.

He is also the
author of an article entitled De Bona
Fe (In Good Faith), which was
published in Directa, a
Catalan social journal, and then in the
Basque
newspaper Berria. In the article, Oleguer questions
the
independence of the Spanish judiciary, using the
ETA terrorist Ignacio De
Juana Chaos as an example of
the hypocrisy of the system. It is a system
he
distrusts, right down to its party political
representatives,
insisting: "No party represents me. I
feel closer to civil society than
political parties;
the only thing they really want from the people is
a
vote every four years. That’s not the democracy I
believe
in."

Oleguer’s article was a reflection on the state of law
and De
Juana was just one example, but the fall-out
was intense. He was portrayed
as supporting a
convicted terrorist with 25 deaths on his hands. The
press
attacked him, the former Bolton striker Salva
Ballesta said he deserved "less
respect than a dog
turd", and boot sponsors Kelme dumped him. When
Barça
visited Valencia , he was whistled and booed with
every
touch.

Wouldn’t it have been easier to keep his mouth shut?
"Yes," he
says softly, "but life isn’t easy. If we
want a better world, we all need to
roll up our
sleeves. It’s easy to moan to your friends and then
do
nothing. The consequences I suffer are nothing
compared to what many
people go through. What did
sadden me, though, was that most didn’t actually
read
the piece. If people engaged in dialogue with
intelligence and
disagreed, then fine, but they
didn’t."

And yet Oleguer is realistic
enough to recognise that
snap judgements are inevitable, that the headlines

would focus on De Juana. It is a product, he believes,
of a world where
superficial imagery triumphs over
analysis in wave after wave of information.
"I often
ask myself why we went to war in Iraq , why people
weren’t more
scandalised by it, why they didn’t do
more when polls said they were
anti-war. That’s one of
the great questions. But we live in a society
where
the news is voracious," he says. "There are stories
that are hugely
important but within a week they’re
forgotten.

"For me, it’s shameful
that [ Iraq ] was destroyed.
And now they say: ‘Oh, actually, no, there
weren’t any
Weapons of Mass Destruction after all but we’re going
to stay
here a while because there’s such disorder’.
But, that disorder was created
by you! It’s clear that
there are imperialistic, economic and
strategic
interests behind the war but the news moves on and
everyone
focuses on something else. We have to stop
and reflect a bit on where we are
going, about
imposing a more sustainable type of development, with
genuine
cooperation."

But doesn’t football serve the same function, could it

not be seen as a modern day opium of the masses? One
to which Oleguer
contributes? "It is helpful to
rationalise the game, but football does
matter," he
says. "Because people give it importance."

And for
Oleguer, nowhere is that more significant than
at Barcelona , the club that
presents itself as a
Catalan flagship, an anti-Francoist resistance
force.
Oleguer writes in his book that: "When Barcelona win
the league,
we become the Army of joy finally able to
face up to [Franco’s troops]. We
imagine ourselves
halting that pack of tanks, responding to their
bullets
with song, laughing in the face of the fascist
ire."

It might sound
far fetched, and Barça’s history is far
less clear-cut than the official
version would have
it, but at least with Oleguer there’s no shallow
lip
service to the legend, no ¡Visca Barça, Visca
Catalunya! Now, where’s
my cheque?. "For me, Barcelona
is genuinely special," he says. "It is the
invocation
of a country, representing Catalan identity and
culture. Barça
was a conduit for a feeling when people
could not express themselves and for
me it’s a dream
to be here at such a successful time."

In Good Faith,
by Oleguer Presas (translated by Sid
Lowe)

Ignacio De Juana Chaos has
spent the last twenty years
in jail. Reduced according to the penitentiary
rules
put in place by the previous government, he had been
condemned to an
18-year sentence for the crimes he
committed. However he remains in jail on
remand,
pending the final resolution of the case which has
been opened
against him because of two articles
published in the newspaper Gara. The high
court
[Tribunal de Audiencia Nacional] judged that in those
articles, De
Juana Chaos committed the crime of making
terrorist threats and condemned
him to 12 and a half
years in jail. De Juana Chaos has decided to go
on
hunger strike in protest against that ruling and is
prepared to take
his protest to the ultimate
conclusion [his death].

The State of Law
[estado de derecho] – that phrase
that has been repeated so many times you
would think
it was an advertising campaign – does not permit the
death
sentence nor life imprisonment. Likewise, there
is no room for euthanasia. I
will allow myself to be
guided by good faith and will therefore
presuppose
that the State of Law has not stopped trusting in its
own laws
and still does not want to impose the death
sentence or life imprisonment.
Guided by that same
good faith, I will assume that there is no
political
intention to make euthanasia legal. I will suppose,
again guided
by good faith, that the content of De
Juana Chaos’s articles is sufficiently
explicit and
unambiguous as to keep a man in jail, despite the risk
that
he may die there. I would like to believe that in
the State of Law freedom of
expression exists and that
in this case, just as in the Egunkaria case or in
the
case of the actor Pepe Rubianes (to cite just two
examples), there is
sufficient evidence to try those
involved. If that were not so, everyone
would be
protesting long and loud like they do when freedom of
expression
is denied in other countries, such as
Morocco , Cuba or Turkey . Good faith
obliges me to
believe that in the State of Law, justice is equal
for
everyone, that political pressure has no part to play
and that
judicial independence really does exist; that
when the Minister of Justice
Lopez Aguilar announces,
in reference to the De Juana case, that "the

government will construct new punishments and
sanctions to avoid such
releases", those words have no
influence on the judicial
sentence.

Actions speak louder than words, they say. Well,
David
Fernàndez in his book Crónicas del 6 y otros detalles
de la cloaca
policial, informs us of the following
events: the ex-Civil Guard General and
the man
responsible for the horrors of Intaxaurrondo, Enrique
Rodríguez
Galindo, was condemned to 75 years in jail
for the assassination of Lasa and
Zabala but served
just over four years, claiming health problems.
Julen
Elorriaga was also released for health reasons:
condemned to almost
80 years in jail, he served just
3% of his sentence. After conning the whole
of Spain ,
De la Rosa is able to enjoy a generous house arrest
because of
depression. Rafael Vera, condemned to 10
years in jail for the GAL-led kidnap
of Segundo Marey,
spent just eight years in jail for the same reason …

David, in his book, talks mainly about torture and
torturers;
about how the justice system seems to see
different degrees of severity based
not on the crime
but the perpetrator of the crime; about how the media

machine works so as to criminalize certain forms of
dissidence and not
others; of how the police create
the evidence necessary to implicate people
according
to their political interests; of how the government
does not
want to know about the reports put together
by the United Nations’ special
investigators on
torture or even hear about organisations like
Amnesty
International, who have claimed that in this [Spain’s]
State of
Law, torturing does take place.

But now, on top of all that, it turns out
that the
attorney’s office from the Audiencia Nacional has
asked for the
Egunkaria case to be dropped because,
they allege, there is no proof. It
turns out that, in
November 2004, a court in Strasbourg condemned
the
Spanish state for "not investigating" the tortures
denounced some
twelve years earlier by 17 supporters
of Catalan independence – it was
necessary to silence
discordant voices during the Olympic Games. It
turns
out that, in November 2005, Zapatero pardoned four
policemen from
Vigo who had been suspended and
sentenced to 2-4 years for beating, insulting
and
humiliating the Senegalese citizen, Mamadou Kane. It
turns out that
Aznar had done the same in December
2000: 14 policemen convicted for torture
were
pardoned. One of them was a reoffender. It turns out


that I do not know what to think. Too often the
State of Law has dark spots
which make me doubt. It
smells of hypocrisy. And too much hypocrisy can
make
you lose that good faith

Deixa un comentari

L'adreça electrònica no es publicarà. Els camps necessaris estan marcats amb *

Aquest lloc està protegit per reCAPTCHA i s’apliquen la política de privadesa i les condicions del servei de Google.

Us ha agradat aquest article? Compartiu-lo!