As Spain convicts 21 for the 11 March bombings, in Madrid Serene Assir witnesses the consolidation of a culture of judicial and legal power On 31 October, the Spanish National Court convicted 21 of 28 suspects for the 11 March 2004 Madrid bombings, which killed 191 people and injured up to 2,000 others. Among the convicted, Jamal Zougam, Othman Al-Gnaoui and Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras received heavy prison sentences, with Moroccan nationals Zougam and Al-Ganoui sentenced to 30 years in jail for each of the 191 killed, 20 for each of the injured and an additional 12 years for belonging to a terrorist organisation. Among those acquitted was Rabie Osman, known as "Mohamed the Egyptian" and as "the brain", who was extradited from Italy in 2004 to stand trial for his alleged role masterminding the attacks. The leading Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) dismissed critics, mainly from the conservative party in opposition, the Partido Popular (PP), who had clamoured to have an alleged mastermind convicted. That there is no juridical or legal category for the intellectual authorship of a crime, said Spanish Minister of Defence Jose Antonio Alonso, renders an alleged mastermind an "invented" figure. Two days after the sentence, 10 of those convicted began a hunger strike, to protest against the harsh sentences, among them Zougam and Al-Gnaoui. But for many of those representing the families of the victims as well as the more conservative flanks of the Spanish political and "parapolitical" establishment, the ruling was dissatisfactory because no mastermind was identified or convicted. On the back of such protests, the prosecutor's office of the National Court has announced that it will appeal the decision not to convict Osman. Politically, the sentence had repercussions on power relations between the ruling PSOE and the PP, as the court established that beyond doubt the train bombings of the morning of 11 March 2004 were perpetrated by a "jihadist" cell -- thus scrapping the PP's proposition that the Basque separatist group may have been involved. At the time of writing, the president of the PP, Mariano Rajoy, had yet to make an official statement on the sentence, in spite of persistent calls from the centre-left. The right-wing daily ABC ran an editorial on 4 November accusing the PSOE of using the sentence politically, and complained that it is likely that Spanish political and media discourse will likely be dominated by news of the sentence from now till the general election in spring 2008, at the expense of other issues on the political agenda. For the government, however, the sentence represented a coup, one which consolidated its public legitimacy amidst crises including failed talks with ETA. It has proven that the 2004 election that brought the PSOE into power in the first place was morally legitimate, in that the high voter turnout was to a great degree fomented by the 11 March bombings and a drive to immediately withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq -- which the PSOE government promptly did. "Justice has been done," declared Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Rodriguez Zapatero, emboldening his party's position of consolidating a "state of law" (or estado de derecho in Spanish) in the country, where laws and rights overshadow all. El Pais, Spain's leading centre-left publication hailed the court and declared that the sentence proved that Spain had at last consolidated itself as a transparent democracy, whose system is based on the rule of law. Indeed, beyond the political disparities between the country's leading parties and regardless of whether the sentence was "too heavy" or "too light", especially in view of the fact that this has been the most holistic trial the world has seen within the context of the "war on terror" since 2001, there appears to be a generalised drive towards establishing the legal order as the basic foundation of Spanish political life. Beyond the indubitable need for a trial of the suspects in the terrorist attack of 2004, there are indications of a wider drive that finds consolidation with this sentence to consolidate that legal order. In a country whose history has so consistently been fomented by the power of the executive, such a drive can be viewed within the context of a broader societal shift away from fragmentation -- and all the vibrancy that fragmentation can offer -- towards bringing about the state's final homogeneity, one that politics has not managed to forge over hundreds of years. Implicitly included in this drive for homogeneity is a shift of authority to take action out of the hands of the citizens of the country. A racist incident that took the Spanish media by storm for a week before the sentence was issued, and continued to be discussed afterwards, involved a violent attack on a 16-year-old Ecuadorian girl in a train in a suburb of Barcelona. Spanish public opinion was outraged, not only by the attack itself, but by the failure of a fellow passenger to intervene. "I was immobilised, I wanted to intervene, but I didn't know what to do," passenger Jesus Prieto, aged 23, said during a subsequent television declaration. While he was criticised widely for his failure to intervene, there was also a wide sense of empathy with him expressed amongst those interviewed on the incident in the media, including socialites and tabloid journalists, who arguably have a strong influence on the shaping of public opinion on what appear to be routine matters. "Civil society is very strong in Spain, stronger than in many European countries," said Director of the International Human Rights Law Department at the American University in Cairo Tanya Monforte. "What we are witnessing now is a shift to social reform through law. But the cost of the translation to a language that is inaccessible to the majority is heavy: not only can the majority not speak the language, they are also unable to manoeuvre in it. The whole concept of justice changes with that shift. If you have a dispute with your neighbour, for instance, you seek legal intervention as opposed to resolving the matter on a community level." Arguably, the effects of the shift away from community power, traditionally so strong in Spain, are already visible at the grassroots level. Waiting for his bus to arrive, one madrileño said in anger over the incident, "Everything that goes badly in Spain is the judges' fault. They should be taking care of punishing people. Those who blame the poor man who witnessed the attack are fools. It's not up to us to take care of justice: it's up to the judges." As she listened, an Ecuadorian woman looked down at the ground, nodding in silent agreement.
