MADRID (AFP) — Descendants of refugees who fled Spain during the 1936-39 civil war or the ensuing dictatorship are contributing to a DNA bank to help identify bodies in mass graves believed to be victims of General Franco's forces.
Spaniards from France, Switzerland, Italy and Brazil, where many had emigrated during the war, gathered this past week in the cultural centre in the town of Aranda de Duero, in Burgos province north of Madrid.
All believe that relatives who disappeared during the war or the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco are buried in some of the seven mass graves in the area.
A total of 110 people submitted saliva for DNA analysis, the results of which it is hoped will be ready by early 2009, said Emilio Silva, head of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH).
Silva's association has initiated the project which he hopes will spur the uncovering of more mass graves in Spain.
Historians estimate about 500,000 people from both sides were killed in the civil war, which was sparked by Franco's insurgency against the democratically elected left-wing Republican government.
After Franco's victory, historians say 50,000 Republicans were executed by Nationalist forces and tens of thousands were incarcerated, the majority in the early years of his rule.
While the regime honoured its own dead, it left tens of thousands of its opponents buried in hundreds of unmarked graves across the country.
Following Franco's death in 1975, all political parties tacitly agreed to put the war and regime behind them and Spain granted an amnesty for crimes committed under the dictator's iron-fisted rule.
But last October Spain's Socialist government passed a "Law of Historical Memory" which, among other measures, provided for state subsidies for associations set up in recent years to exhume the remains from the mass graves.
The ARMH has exhumed 1,200 bodies from 110 mass graves over the past eight years, almost all of which contained victims of Franco's side.
It has information on the existence of almost 400 graves in the country, where people are seeking the bodies of some 5,000 relatives who disappeared under Franco.
The ARMH decided to set up first the DNA bank in Burgos province, as it is an "area with many disappeared" due possibly to "political cleansing" that took place there where many rail workers unions were based and where Franco had installed his government during the war, Silva told AFP.
The association, which started receiving state funding just two years ago, has called on the state to do more to help identify the victims of Franco, despite the new law.
"Spain is practically an exception. Already in South Africa, in Guatemala, Cyprus, Timor, it has been the state" at the forefront of such efforts.
"Instead of guaranteeing human rights, the state is delegating to a group of volunteers," he said.
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