Pre-dawn military raid of Muslim community, January 10, 2006

Sometime before dawn I was awoken by what sounded like furniture being knocked over and broken. This was followed by a lot of heavy footsteps up and down the stairs outside our door. As my groggy mind tried to imagine what was going on and discarded unlikely answers I realized it must be an arrest.

When the radio alarm went off later, the staccato voice of a Catalan news announcer reported a nationally coordinated raid of “Islamic terrorists” in Madrid, the Basque country and in Vilanova i la Geltrú. As I helped my daughter eat breakfast I watched a television news report including local footage of the raid at multiple locations in town. One of the men arrested is the head of the Muslim cultural association, another is the owner of two halal butcher shops and another is the iman of the mosque. Because the iman held the keys to the mosque, the congregation was unable to enter it on one of the most important holy days of the year adding further distress to a community in shock.



By the time I dropped off my daughter at day-care near the central plaza, a large group of men from the Muslim community had gathered in front of city hall to protest the raid. I took a photo of part of this group (below). The older bearded man on the left was making a statement to the press, in part in response to the timing of the police action. He said that the raids were “an attack against Islam.” He explained that “today is the Muslim holy day of the sacrifice of the lamb that commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son and God’s command to sacrifice a lamb instead.” He said that the Muslim community is duty bound to gather in the mosque, to pray and offer thanks for the gift of God.



The town council provided the Vella Peixateria, (the old fish market, a vacant neo-classical building near our house) as a temporary mosque. I learned later that not only was the mosque closed on this holy day but also there was no lamb for the feast because the butcher had been arrested. The iman was also holding 120,000 euros for the congregation who were about to purchase a lot on which to build a mosque (the current one is just an apartment). Three of the men detained had served as community liaisons to the city and were well-liked and familiar to many people due to periodic local media interviews. The raids effectively severed relations between the Muslim community and city government. Whether calculated or not, the timing did seem to maximize the anguish and isolation caused by the raid.

la Vella Peixateria is the temporary mosque

The Barcelona newspapers and television newscasts presented the allegations against the detained as established fact. The newspaper with the largest circulation in Catalunya published a chart depicting the flow of “kamikazes” from North Africa, to the presumed cells in Vilanova i la Geltrú and Madrid, and then on to Turkey, Syria and Iraq. News coverage was sensationalistic and simply reported the national government's version of events without interviewing local representatives or members of Muslim communities.




My neighbor from across the hall told me that there had been a “round up of al Qaeda among the Moroccans in Vilanova i la Geltrú”. He said that there was an “Arab couple” living on the third floor and another on the fifth floor. He said that no one knew what had happened to them in the raid. In a later news broadcast, the mayor said that no one should jump to conclusions, that the people detained should be presumed innocent until proven otherwise, and that the convivència,* that all Vilanovans enjoyed between them should continue as normal. A young man and woman representing the Muslim Neighborhood Association denounced terrorism and said that the majority of the community did not believe in it, and that Islam is about peace and convivència with one’s neighbors, and that terrorism is very far from true Islam. The editorial in the local paper also invoked convivència, warning against equating Islam with terrorism, against a tendency towards xenophobia, and for the need to quickly re-establish links to members of the Muslim community.



The next day I saw a demonstration led by wives, family and friends of the detained following a press conference. The women held signs reading Queremos una convivencia tranquilla, (We want peaceful coexistence), No Somos Terroristas, Somos Musulmanes (We aren’t Terrorists, we’re Muslims), and Queremos Justícia (We Want Justice). At the press conference the group of friends, family and a number of community organizations released a statement in Catalan that was printed in full in the local paper (the demonstration also merited one photo in the Barcelona press but without mentioning the content of the statement).

Broadcast of press conference on local television

The community statement follows:

Communication regarding the events of Tuesday, January 10
Regarding the actions that took place on the day of holy day of the Sacrifice of the Lamb in the Muslim community, we wish to communicate the following:

First, our indignation regarding the treatment by the state, national and international press, that was far from the criteria of professional journalism to objectively inform, but rather sensationalized and to repeated the criminalized version of events without question, and without respecting presumed innocence or exaggeration of the accusations.
…We are not so ingenuous as to think that it was a mere coincidence that this [raid] took place on the day of the Sacrifice, one of our most important and well attended [holy days]. A warning: but a warning for what purpose? To say that “terrorists will be persecuted to the bitter end” Or to impose assumptions on a vulnerable immigrant community such that it internalizes not only a fear of itself but also “it’s own guilt”?
…Neither does it seem to be a coincidence that the raid dramatically portrayed the political and military forces of the state as if they were the heroes of an action movie…There was a huge deployment of heavily-armed forces, throughout many streets of the town, that communicated a sense of extreme danger, increased the general sense of insecurity and fuels the fire of rejection towards the North African community and immigrants in general.

To hear the news or see the front pages of the newspapers increased the endemic fear. Before validating the accusations we need to wait for the completion of the justice process, which [in the case of] past detentions yielded inconsistent results, with many detainees found innocent of wrong-doing but who were arrested simply because they were related to or were acquainted with other suspects.
…We must remember the previous President José María Aznar and other leaders of his party declaring as absolutely factual the accusation of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction at the moment before the occupation. And we say this because many of us know some of the 14 detainees and know that they are the people least likely to be implicated in the crimes for which they have been accused.

We are also very worried about the treatment of the detainees under the Anti-Terrorism Law, which results in absolute isolation with no opportunity to communicate one’s condition to one’s family, or to receive legal assistance. The law provides no guarantees against the application of torture or protections against self-inculpation as proof in place of concrete evidence.

Finally, we wish to direct a comment to political representatives, particularly the local ones, who, from the onset, have sought to communicate an image of normality and conciliation, but have failed to defend the dignity of many of the citizens they represent, nor do anything to ease the anxieties of the families who have still received no information about the detainees.
Above all, we wish this to be a cry for respect, for normality and solidarity, and to carry out the actions that will bring these results.

(Comunicat sobre els fets de dimarts 10 de gener. Diari de Vilanova. 13 January 2006. Page 10)

*This term convivència, literally “living together” is a key element of popular interculturalist discourse in Catalunya. It derives from historic practices of mutual respect and cooperation between Muslims, Christians and Jews during various spans of Spain’s medieval period (under both Christian and Muslim rule) until the forced expulsion of Muslim and Jews in 1492 by “the Catholic Monarchs” Ferdinand and Isabella. Today convivència, expresses a commitment to mutual cultural interchange that does seem to result in concrete practices of solidarity, the opening of various public spaces for immigrants and comparatively, much lower rates of xenophobic expression than found in the US, France or Britain. But it is also often idealistic and based on unchallenged assumptions by the majority, and a frequent lack of recognition of structural inequalities. It is claimed both by those who see it as a basis for structural change, and those who limit convivència, to notions of civility and hospitality. In this way, members of the Muslim community who invoked convivència themselves, could also criticize the mayor for using the term in order to “calm” and “normalize” things without recognizing the impact of this assault on their lives.