MADRID: Spanish lawmakers on Thursday gave the first stamp of approval to a bill which seeks to rehabilitate the memory of leftwing victims of Spain’s 1936-39 civil war and Francisco Franco’s dictatorship.

The proposed law threatens to fuel tensions in a nation where public opinion is still divided over the legacy of the dictatorship that ended with Franco’s death in 1975.

Franco assumed power after the civil war in which his Nationalists defeated Republicans, leaving the country in ruins and mourning hundreds of thousands of dead.

While his regime honoured its own dead, it left its opponents buried in unmarked graves across the country. The “Democratic Memory” bill, passed in the first reading by the lower house of parliament, will for the first time make unearthing the mass graves a “state responsibility”.

Up until now the search for the Franco-era disappeared has been carried out by voluntary associations, as was featured in Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s most recent film “Parallel Mothers”.

The bill makes Spain “a better country and definitively turns the page on the darkest period of our history,” the minister in charge of the bill, Felix Bolanos, told parliament ahead of the vote.

It was approved with 173 votes in favour and 159 against.

Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said “there are still 114,000 disappeared” in Spain, mostly Republicans. Only Cambodia has more forcibly disappeared people, he added.

Published in Dawn, July 15th, 2022