Show Us Your Face

I say burka, you say burqa. Burka, burqa, let’s take the whole thing off.

If you happen to be a Muslim woman and happen to habitually wear a burka (or burqa), then you might be well advised to give Sa Pobla a wide berth. Little Sa Pobla, a town fast seeking for itself the title of Mallorca’s most publicity-attracting municipality, is to ban the burka. Good for Sa Pobla. Not because it’s necessarily a good idea, but because it’s a means of deflecting attention from the town’s parlous financial state.

Banning the burka, however, could help to swell the town hall’s coffers. A 50 euros fine here, 200 euros fine there, three grand for a serial burka offender. “Alhamdulillah”; Sa Pobla is suddenly rich again.

Sa Pobla has a relatively high Muslim population. Most are from Morocco, some 2,000 people out of a total of around 13,000 inhabitants. According to one blog, other Muslims are from countries such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, and the women can typically be seen, clad in the burka or niqab, at the gates of schools waiting for their children. I’ll take its word for it.

The town is to become the first in the Balearics to say no to the burka. It follows where towns and cities on the peninsula have led, especially in Catalonia (and the blog I refer to is a Catalan one). The Catalans have bigged up a burka ban. The town of Lleida was the first and then Barcelona said show us your face.

There is no ban as such on the burka in Spain. The national Senate voted in favour of a ban last year, only for the Congress to not vote in favour. The issue is meant to be up for debate, but seems to have been lost along with a general law on rellgious freedoms. Nevertheless, ban or no ban, the Islamic Human Rights Commission has complained that the Spanish Government permits local councils to regulate as they see fit.

When I first heard about Sa Pobla’s ban, my reaction was “how can they?”. I am not against them banning the burka – it is an absurdity; obscenity even – but on what basis can local authorities take such a measure? An order of good government, citizenship and co-existence would seem to allow them to do so. However, this is an issue on which the state should be arbitrating and legislating, not a small town in Mallorca.

The state should be legislating because ad-hoc bans are questionable in terms of the constitution, which explicitly makes provisions for religious freedoms and for safeguarding (for all people in Spain) their traditions, cultures and human rights.

It is this constitutional aspect that ties up with mooted reforms of laws on religious freedoms. The key word in all of this is “co-existence”, one seemingly invoked in the local law in Sa Pobla, and “harmonious co-existence” in particular. This, and its definition in law and under the constitution, is a potential minefield. What exactly would represent the parameters of “harmonious co-existence”?

For the mayor of Sa Pobla, it is pretty clear what it means. The town should not be subject to “elements which … distort the co-existence”. Moreover, there should be integration based on the “values of our society, which is Mallorcan”. It is the very mention of “Mallorcan”, however, that shows how complicated the debate is and therefore how complicated any legal or constitutional amendment would be.

Are law and the constitution meant to reflect the traditions of every individual part of Spain when it comes to co-existence and religious freedoms? Because this is what the mayor seems to be suggesting. In Andalusia, there are values, as there are in Galicia and in Catalonia.

And to raise the “values” word is a minefield of its own. What are the values of Mallorcan society in any event? Or indeed of Spanish society?

The values, for which read also traditions, will mean that in Sa Pobla a blanket ban on the face being covered will not be totally blanket. A son of Michael Jackson would probably be included, and the wearing of balaclavas will certainly be included, but exceptions will be made for the pointy-head hoodies of Easter processions, for demons and beasties and for the “big heads” of fiesta times.

The difference is that the burka is not something worn for a specific celebration. Its wearing is absurd. Sa Pobla is not wrong to seek its banning, but it is wrong in that it should be the state which is deciding and in that it, as with other local councils, should not be allowed to play fast and loose with the constitution.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Council Tack

The Unión Progreso y Democracia (UPyD) party has nicked my idea. It has proposed that the islands’ councils, and the Mallorca council in particular, be scrapped. You may know that I had suggested this recently, as I have suggested it before over the years.

I don’t suppose for one moment that there are those in the UPyD who are paying any attention to what I have to suggest, but I’ll settle for the fact that one party at any rate seems to see the sense in getting rid of the Council of Mallorca and therefore the lack of sense of its being.

There again, the UPyD, new kids on the political block, having been only formed in 2007, doesn’t have much to lose by making audacious proposals. Not that it is necessarily that audacious. There are hints that the Partido Popular (PP) might be thinking along similar lines, while the PSOE candidate for national president, Alfredo Rubalcaba, has sort of flagged up the idea as well. The UPyD, though, is the only party to come out and say unequivocally that the Council should go.

The UPyD is a party that you might describe as being a bit like the Liberal Democrats. It is of the centre, and while it is against nationalism, and so distances itself from the PP with its nationalist tendencies, it also believes there is too much decentralisation of government in Spain. This is less an anti-regionalism philosophy and more a practical one.

The momentum towards eliminating the Council and therefore the cost of running it and the duplications it causes is gathering, as also a momentum is growing to cut back or eliminate other forms of provincial government in Spain below that of the autonomous communities (of which the Balearics are one).

What might hold this momentum back is the history of the Council. It is only relatively new, having been formed, along with the councils of the other Balearic islands, after the collapse of the Franco regime and with the introduction of autonomous government in the islands in the early 1980s.

Consequently, the Council is symbolic of the new democratic era in the Balearics and in Spain as a whole. And there is a bit more history to it. Island councils were due to have been formed in the 1930s, but the Civil War got in the way. Prior to this, there had only been a provincial deputation for the Balearics as a whole (which dated back to the first half of the nineteenth century). The fact that the Council’s existence was delayed by some fifty years by Franco does give an historical as well as an emotional force that demands that it should stay.

The Council has a whole raft of responsibilities, granted to it under the constitution and statutes relating to the autonomous communities. To take these away completely, and so follow the trend started by the removal of tourism promotion and absorbing them within the regional government, would require a constitutional change. Or at least, one would imagine that it would.

Getting rid of the Council would be fraught with danger because it would be nuanced by parties with strong regional philosophies as turning the clock back to the bad old days and as undermining the authority given to the islands when they were made an autonomous community.

Of these parties, however, only the Mallorcan socialists really count for anything at present. PSOE (nationally if not locally) appears as though it might be adopting a more pragmatic approach which would allow for the Council’s dismantling, while the PP locally would probably be prepared to go along with it. The UPyD doesn’t really count for much either, but it has at least brought the subject fully out into the open.

The threat to the Council comes mainly because of financial pressures. The discussion as to its future is belated though, which may sound odd as it is an institution barely thirty years old. But its youth tells a different story. The Council was formed in the glow of the new democracy. It is symbolic, there is no question about this, but whether the organisation in that glow of democracy was the right one is the question that now should be asked. And it is being asked.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.