What's pertinent to this Forum is the fact that Jews or other Believers don't dare demand excavations of claimed mass grave sites for those allegedly killed in the so called 'holocau$t'.
The lack of mass grave physical evidence is alone enough to debunk the so called 'holocaust' as alleged. Comments invited.
- Hannover
Spain poised to seek the graves of Franco's disappeared
Giles Tremlett in Madrid
Friday August 23, 2002
The Guardian
More than 60 years after one of Europe's bloodiest civil wars, campaigners believe Spain will set up a truth commission to find out what happened to the tens of thousands of people who disappeared after being arrested by Franco's rebel forces.
The commission was one of the demands made at the UN this week by a group of relatives of the disappeared. They also want the government to dig up and identify the corpses of 30,000 people believed to have been summarily executed by Franco's followers and buried in mass graves.
The campaigners took their case to the UN's working group on forced disappearances after Spanish judges and the People's party government refused to start the search for the bodies.
"This is like the victims of Pinochet in Chile or those of Videla in Argentina," Santiago Macias of the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory said. "We know who the assassins were but, in this case, we are not after them. What we want is the historic truth."
The People's party surprised campaigners yesterday by saying it would implement any decision made by the UN working group, despite being under no legal obligation to do so. A decision is due within the next 15 days.
In many cases clues to the whereabouts of victims remain in closed military archives, the campaigners say. These archives also include the final words to relatives of some of the victims who were given the chance to leave a written message before being killed.
"The Spanish judicial authorities consider that the mass graves from the civil war and in the years after General Franco took power have no legal interest," Montserrat Sans, a US lawyer acting for the association, told the UN working group this week.
"Except on a few recent occasions, Spanish judges have refused to order the exhumation of bodies or investigate the cause of death."
The campaigners say there are huge mass graves, each containing more than 1,000 corpses, near Oviedo and Gijon in the north, Teruel in the east and Seville in the south. The biggest, near Merida in the south-west, contains 3,500 bodies.
Most of the missing corpses are of republicans captured or detained during the civil war, but there were also many cases of people being summarily executed in the years immediately after the war.
The UN working group was told that successive Spanish governments, frightened by the attempted military coup of 1981, had been scared of reviving the brutal passions of the civil war.
In consequence they had deliberately ignored the problem of those who disappeared, despite the pleas of relatives who want to give their loved ones a decent burial.
In the past three years a handful of smaller mass graves have been discovered by volunteers who have paid for the bodies to be exhumed and for DNA tests to be made on the skeletal remains retrieved from the Leon region in the north-west. The results of the first four sets of tests are due to be revealed next month.
"In many towns and villages in Spain people are still frightened of talking about the civil war," Ms Sans said. "Spain's transition to democracy was carried out leaving aside the internationally recognised duty of all states to investigate serious and systematic violations of fundamental rights".
The campaigners have called on the working group to "recommend to the Spanish state that it meets its obligations in international human rights matters and puts an end to the discriminatory treatment that still affects the relatives of victims by refusing them the right to truth and justice".
"Maintaining the current situation ... is a serious break with the obligations of the state to investigate such matters and put an end to the affront that not recognising a society's own disappeared constitutes," Ms Sans said.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
