11-M ONE YEAR ON MATT VAUGHAN looks at the continued impact Europe’s worst terrorist attack is having on Madrid
IT IS HARD not to be affected by the effects of the March 11th 2004 train bombings in Madrid when you spend a year in the city. It is more than twelve months now since those rucksacks packed with explosives were detonated on various suburban trains in and around central Madrid, killing almost 200 civilians and injuring more than a thousand, and yet the emotions aroused by the most brutal and horrific terrorist atrocity in western Europe still hang in the air like a chill mist. Ever since I arrived here I have been struck by the liveliness – joie de vivre, to use a hackneyed phrase – of the inhabitants of the city and the amount of horror and disbelief that they still feel when they try and come to terms with the horrendous deaths of so many lives is all too evident.
These emotions are displayed in different ways, of course. The memorial events this year were notable for several reasons: firstly, a new section of the Retiro park was opened (the “Bosque de los Ausentes” or “Wood of the Missing”) containing 192 young trees, one for each of the dead. Silences were held all across the country, footballers wore black armbands, candles and flowers were piled high at Atocha station as relatives tried to find some way to mark the death of their loved ones.Yet the relatives of the victims of the attacks were almost all absent, claiming that their grief had been hijacked by politicians for political gain. The Association for the Victims of Terrorism broke off relations in February with Gregorio Peces- Barba, the government-appointed representative for people affected by this and other atrocities, and are still refusing to speak to him, such is their anger and feeling of betrayal. Other people try to vent their rage by daubing walls and public areas with political or racist graffiti: “11-M: thankyou, Partido Popular” was one I saw in Sol a few weeks ago, or the more straightforward “Putos moros” on a bus, helpfully translated into English for anyone who doesn´t know what “F****** Arabs” means. Just this morning on the way to school I saw a man twist his fingers into the shape of a gun and point it at two women wearing headscarves who were standing next to me,mouthing something to them that I couldn´t catch. Almost all of the children I teach at school had a personal story about 11-M: their friend would have caught the train but there was a train strike which saved his life; her father would have been on it but overslept; their aunt knew someone from work who was two carriages down from the bomb and was cut by glass, and so on.
All this is difficult to take in. The meaningless death of one person murdered by fanatics bent on a global Islamic revolution is horrific enough, but the slaughter of nearly 200 of them in packed commuter trains is hard to come to terms with. The bombings ended 192 lives, changed an entire government, brought Spanish troops out of Iraq, soured relations between Spain and the USA, and threw a capital city into a shock so massive that it is still struggling to come out of it. The bombings have vanished from the news, the first anniversary has been and gone, but the legacy of the 192 dead is still haunting the city today.Madrileños are tough people, and for all the horror of the bombings, life for the rest of the city goes on, albeit with a stronger sense of the real value and treasure that is human life.
