Pacifists protest against parade

Press, 29 May 1984, Page 8

Pacifists protest against parade

NZPA-Reuter Valladolid The Spanish armed forces staged their annual flag day parade yesterday in the face of unprecedented counter-demonstrations by pacifists opposed to Spain’s N.A.T.O. membership. More than 2000 soldiers and police, backed by antiriot squads, threw up a tight security net around Valladolid’s central boulevard where 6000 soldiers, airmen, and seamen marched past •• King Juan Carlos. The Prime Minister, Mr Felipe Gonzalez, and Cabinet Ministers also watched the parade in which tanks and fighter jets took part. Several kilometres across the city’s Pisuerga River, hundreds of pacifists staged

a rival rally with pop-stars, theatre groups, and other entertainers. A similar peace festival was also celebrated in a Madrid park. Spanish journalists said that the armed forces ceremony had never before sparked such a wave of anti-military feeling. Riot police in the northern Basque city of San Sebastian broke up a demonstration of several hundred pacifists who marched on military headquarters there after forming a “human' peace chain” through the streets. The Castilian city of Valladolid has been the centre of a week-long campaign against the military parade, which grew out of the

annual march-past staged under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco to celebrate his 1936-39 civil war victory. Many of those taking the salute on the parade-stand yesterday wore civil war victory decorations and official Defence Ministry bulletins on the event used the old Franco terminology for the war, referring to it as “a national crusade.” General Franco died in 1975, and the overt Rightwing bias of the ceremony was removed seven years ago when it was renamed the Armed Forces Parade and moved out of the Spanish capital. Politics caught up with it again this year as Spain’s

mushrooming pacifist movements turned their attention on the armed forces to protest against a huge increase in domestic arms spending and continued membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which Spain joined in 1982. Mr Gonzalez’s Socialist Government says that it will give Spaniards the chance to quit N.A.T.O. by a referendum, probably next year. Top officers have lashed out at the pacifists, saying that they were playing into Moscow’s hands. Each night for the last week the police have dragged away hundreds of hymnsinging pacifists on peaceful sit-down protests near Valladolid military centres.