Catalonia to play Tunisia in traditional Christmas friendly #football #sports

Puyol in a match beetwen Catalonia and Colombia

By David Redshaw

Every player from Barcelona and Espanyol has informed the Catalan Football Federation (FCF) they will be available to represent the nation in the traditional friendly over the Christmas holiday period. This year's opposition will be Tunisia and the game will be held at the Estadio Lluis Companys - the former home of Espanyol before the move to their present Cornella El-Prat stadium - on December 30.

Eight Barcelona players (Carles Puyol, Xavi Hernández, Victor Valdés, Gerard Piqué, Cesc Fabregas, Sergio Busquets, Andreu Fontàs and Isaac Cuenca) and eight from Espanyol (Sergio García, Joan Verdú, Javi Márquez, Álvaro Vázquez, Jordi Amat, Didac Vilà, Raúl Rodríguez and Kiko Casilla) have already been photographed in the Catalan selection's kit. However, the final squad will not be named until one week before the game when boss Johan Cruyff, who took the reins in November, 2009, announces his 23-man squad.

Before finalising their selection the FCF has first to negotiate with La Primera clubs to make sure their Catalan players are available for the game. For example, Valencia have Jordi Alba, Bruno Saltor and Víctor Ruiz as potential participants but Cruyff and his assistant Oscar García will also draw on players from Segunda A and Segunda B teams Gimnástic de Tarragona (Nastic), Girona, Sabadell and Barcelona B.

While Catalonia is not affiliated to either UEFA or FIFA (and by extension not allowed to take part in the World Cup or European Championships) the matches are seen more as exhibitions and almost 200 have been played since 1904. Last year's game against Honduras ended in a 4-0 victory with goals from Bojan Krkic (2), Coro and Sergio García.

http://www.adifferentleague.co.uk/p6_1_11707_catalonia-to-play-tunisia-in-traditional-christmas-friendly.html

The father of the spanish constitution jokes about bombing catalan civilians #news #humanrights #ue

by Cercle Català de Negocis

"I do not know how many times it was necessary to bomb Barcelona. This time things will be solved without having to do so." — Gregorio Peces-Barba

"Freedom of speech cannot be invoked to protect offensiveness and disdain towards persons, territories, and communities." — Catalan Bar Council

Last Thursday, at the 10th Convention of Spanish National Bar in Cadiz, Gregorio Peces-Barba, one of the most prominent fathers of the Spanish Constitution, joked about bombing Barcelona in a reference to Catalonia's ongoing independence process. "We are in better shape than in the past. I do not know how many times it was necessary to bomb Barcelona. This time things will be solved without having to do so."

During his speech, Peces-Barba mused in an allusion to the Catalan and Portuguese wars of secession of the 17th century: "What would have happened had we kept Portugal instead of Catalonia?" "We probably would have been better off with the Portuguese," he quipped.

Representatives of the Catalan Bar Council left the room in protest and later stated in a press release: "Respect for freedom of speech cannot be used to protect offensiveness and disdain towards persons, territories, and communities."

The Spanish Socialist Party, currently in government, considered his comments "inappropriate." No member from the Portuguese government has made any comment yet.

The Spanish politician later added in a radio interview that joking about the Catalan bombings is not the same as joking about the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War or the bombings perpetrated by the Basque terrorist group, ETA, which has recently called for a definitive ceasefire and a start of negotiations with the French and Spanish governments. Peces-Barba also told the interviewer that Catalans are "oversensitive people and should have a better sense of humor." He later apologized to those that might have felt his first words to be offensive.

As some of his Socialist Party colleagues pointed out, Gregorio Peces-Barba may have unwittingly helped the growing independence movement in Catalonia. In a recent government opinion poll, about 46% of the citizens of Catalonia said that they would support independence. Though it is one of the wealthiest and most industrialized regions in Spain, Catalonia has had a fiscal deficit of around 10% of its GDP for several decades, which makes its tax burden one of the highest in Europe. This is one of the most controversial issues between Catalonia and Spain, the other being the persecution of the Catalan language and culture since the 17th Century.

The corridor Europe needs

By Miquel Valls / President of the Chamber of Commerce, Trade and
Navigation of Barcelona.

The European single market's competitiveness within the global
economy's framework requires, as a necessary condition, an efficient
transport system regarding the economic, social and environmental
costs. In this regard, prioritising the Mediterranean Corridor is the
paradigmatic example of a long-term strategy implemented by the
European Commission through its Trans-European Transport Network
proposal.

A strategy that, in the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce, we share and
support, since it strengthens our commitment to foster business
competitiveness, which is the key factor in economic and social
development, here and everywhere. However, it needs to be stressed
that this is not simply to improve logistics, but it represents a firm
and decided determination to benefit the productive economy. Because
our main competitive advantage is our business network's productive
will, based on a great industrial and export tradition.

In fact, prioritising the Mediterranean Corridor relates to the shared
objective to place Mediterranean ports as the main European entry and
exit gateways for trade fluxes with the Far East, as well as to foster
logistics within the Euro-Mediterranean area. It must be taken into
account that Mediterranean ports, with Barcelona's at the fore front,
offer a great connection potential to attract trade traffic between
Asia and Europe, which currently mainly use Northern European ports
(up to 75%).

Consequently, the increase of Asian traffic attraction by Southern
European ports might represent an important contribution to the global
efficiency of the goods transport system, as the European Union seeks
to achieve according to the White Paper on Transport, published this
year. There, it is affirmed that Mediterranean ports offer a shorter
journey time and that their use might be cheaper than Northern
European routes. Roughly, it might represent saving between 15% and
20% of travel time, since three to four navigation days are being cut
off. Since navigation distances are being reduced, and the modal
distribution of land stages is optimised, fuel consumption, energy
dependence and greenhouse gas emissions are reduced.

Therefore, we reach the conclusion that improving land links between
southern and northern Europe is one of the main challenges to improve
the European economy's competitiveness. And, considering
socio-economic profitability criteria, in our home, the main priority
among such unsettled links is the Mediterranean Railway Corridor. The
Corridor Europe needs.

http://www.catalanviews.com/content/corridor-europe-needs

Catalan National Teams

Author: Jordi Quintana

It is widely known that we Catalans have always been supportive of all kinds of sports, even though we can't compete in most international competitions to this day. What's most surprising is that Catalonia has always been one of the first countries to introduce and cultivate the practice of sports, even in the distant past, when all the available information used to come from newspapers and from far away places where people were beginning to practice funky sports.

Catalonia's love affair with all sports has a long tradition. In the early 20th century, Catalans began to create sports associations, way before Spaniards began to do so. Amongst these, we count some of the most popular sports nowadays, like tennis, soccer, and baseball. Catalonia even was one of the founding members of the Fédération Internationale de Rugby Amateur (FIRA), displaying a true interest in the practice of sports at a time when it did not have its current preeminence.

However, this desire for recognition, and the right to compete internationally, which countries like Spain, France, Germany, and even Scotland, England and the Faroe Islands have, is not recognized by the international organizations. They still deny us, mainly on political reasons, not on sports related grounds. It is true that if we had a government backing up the different associations, we would not need to find ways to participate on an individual basis.

Also, this desire is not just a selfish dream of a few self-proclaimed visionaries. Some twenty years ago, several associations working towards getting Catalan national teams (ADOC—Associació per a la Delegació Olímpica de Catalunya and Pro Seleccions catalanes) were able to gather half a million signatures in favor of Catalonia's participation in international competitions. This was at a time when the population in Catalonia was of six and a half million. Unfortunately, these efforts ended up amounting to nothing.

Catalonia has always looked for international recognition. This fact has never been put in question, not even at times when displaying Catalan symbols was plainly outlawed and punished. During Franco's dictatorship, Futbol Club Barcelona, where Messi, Iniesta and Xavi play nowadays, became the de facto representative of our national teams, mostly due to the countless encounters against eternal rival Real Madrid, which had become the regime's symbol. Although the first matches between these two teams lacked any political connotations, in time, the more they played together, the more their rivalry grew and they became estranged. This is how this enmity was created. An enmity between a team from the deep Spain, backed up by the dictatorship's establishment, and a team from the periphery, which did not only not go along with the regime's ideals, but which had become an outright rebellious team. It was thanks to this fact that Barça ended up being a symbol for a whole country, Catalonia.

At that point in history, right in the middle of a dictatorship, the Barça flag became a clear symbol of Catalonia. Displaying a Barça flag was equivalent to giving support to a repressed country. It was precisely during this time when Barça's president, Narcís de Carreras, coined the now legendary sentence: "Barça is more than a team." He said this in order to manifest that this team does not only serve its members, but a whole country.

Nowadays, this statement does not mean exactly the same. The contributions by FC Barcelona to international organizations have given the team a reputation for having great sensitivity towards charitable causes. People nowadays are allowed to display the Catalan flag in the stadiums with no consequences. However, we'd do well to remember that when the famous statement of "more than a team" is touted about at Camp Nou stadium, it's because behind this team there's a whole country that wants to go its own way.

http://helpcatalonia.blogspot.com/2011/10/catalan-national-teams.html

The Catalan school model

Autor: Jose Ignacio Vila 

Catalonia's education system is based on bilingual education. One of its objectives is that all pupils get a good knowledge of the two official languages, Catalan and Spanish. Wallace Lambert points out that, when a society wants bilingual people, the socially weakest language needs to prevail in school education. According to his principle, public schools in Catalonia organise mainly two programmes: a programme to maintain the family language aimed at the Catalan-speaking students, and a programme of starting linguistic immersion aimed at Spanish-speaking children. Both are supported by very positive social attitudes towards the Catalan language. However, the law guarantees families the choice to decide their children's school language during the entire initiation to reading and writing learning (8 years old). In practical terms, there are some 10 Spanish-speaking families as an average number that decide to school their children in Spanish. In the following years, the Spanish language is a school subject, both for the maintenance programmes and linguistic immersion programmes. Nevertheless, especially in the linguistic immersion programme, Spanish has an important presence in the student's informal relations as well as in the relations students keep to solve academic problems in Catalan.

Since 1990, there has been a systematic evaluation of bilingual education results in Catalonia. Regarding linguistic knowledge, there are no differences between Catalan-speaking and Spanish-speaking students in their knowledge of the Spanish language. In addition, there are no differences regarding the knowledge of the Spanish language between students from Catalan schools and those from the rest of Spain. The differences exist in relation to the knowledge of the Catalan language. At the end of obligatory schooling, as it happens in the rest of linguistic immersion programmes around the world, the Spanish-speaking students have less Catalan oral skills than Catalan-speaking students. However, there are no differences regarding the writing language skills. In fact, the Spanish-speaking students have Catalan writing skills on a level with those of Catalan-speaking students along the obligatory secondary education, after nine or more years of schooling (pre-school education and primary education). The 2009 PISA evaluation on reading comprehension placed Catalonia seven points above the OCDE average and 12 points above the Spanish average. Regarding the acquisition of knowledge and skill development of other areas such as mathematics, natural sciences or social sciences, there are no differences between the Catalan-speaking students and Spanish-speaking students.

Since 2000, Catalonia has incorporated thousands and thousands of foreign students to the education system who already represent around 14% of the population. Certainly, these pupils with very different languages are schooled in a programme of linguistic submersion because, among other reasons, the education system is not designed to develop their languages. Therefore, already since the beginning of this century, there is an important movement of educational innovation around these new students under the name of 'new linguistic immersion'. It aims to eliminate the negative effects of obligatory schooling in a programme that does not contemplate the development of their own language. It is obvious that, among others, one of the characteristics of this movement consists of recognising all the languages, and their educative treatment independently of their knowledge by part of the teachers.

Dr. Jose Ignacio Vila
Professor of Education Psychology at the Universitat de Girona (UdG)

http://www.catalanviews.com/content/catalan-school-model

A Europe of Everyone, also of the Catalans

by Josep Bargalló Valls, First Minister and Minister of the Presidency of Catalonia 2004-2006

We, the Catalans, often feel uncomfortable in a turbulent European Union in constant search for a false balance. We feel out of place in a European Union unable to resolve its many crises—all born by a financial sector that expands over its capacity, then shrinks, puts out its hand and looks away. We are marginalized by European institutions that rigorously dictate over insignificant issues while leaving the field wide open and uncontrolled when it comes to topics that are, to us as citizens, of most importance.

It is true that we need a social European Union—one that is not enslaved to the interests of states and economic powers. We need a Europe of the people, of the peoples, and we can get there in many ways: with a greater subsidiarity of decision power, with a higher degree of participation, and more efficient financial regulations, with a more transparent and clear legislation to regulate the doings of banks on public and private debt and in their own activities.

But this is not all. To feel that we are a part of it, we need the European Union to embrace all Europeans as they are. For us, the language is a clear example. Beyond the difficulties of its social use, legal status and regional diversity—all of those being internal aspects—, Catalan is neither a minority language nor a lower class language. With 10 million speakers, it is the 12th most spoken in the European Union—surpassing Finnish, Maltese, Gaelic, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian or Slovenian and rivalling Greek and Portuguese. Nevertheless, Catalan does not yet enjoy the status of being fully recognized as an official European language in the institutions of the European Union. And if we argue that all languages, regardless of the number of speakers, deserve the same respect and attention from public institutions, we have to conclude as well that Catalan is not a minority language: In today's Europe of 27 states, there are 40 languages spoken by less than 300,000 people—the number of Maltese speakers, the smallest of the official languages in the Union. If Catalan was a minority language, how should we define the 28 that have fewer speakers?

And the fact that Catalan is not official in any big state—it is only official in Andorra—is, certainly, an internal anomaly, which we have to solve internally¬, but it should not be an external handicap. In the European Union, 30 million people have a first language that is not official in their country. Catalan is, in this context, I insist, a modern language. It transcends borders and it's spoken in four sovereign states—in the Spanish state, it is official in the autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencia; in the Perpignan region in France; in the city of Alghero in the Italian Sardinia; and in Andorra, a small sovereign state in the Pyrenees, where it is the only official language. It is a language that has always lived close to other languages—there is not a single Catalan-speaker who is not bilingual, because they all have full competence in either Spanish, Italian or French—sometimes in a couple of them. It is a universal vehicle, a language that translates and is translated—it is the tenth most translated language in Europe; and a vehicle, also, for new technologies—it is one of the ten most used languages on the internet, and the only language with its own top-level domain, .cat. Of course, Catalan may not be an internationally "major" language, but it is certainly not a minority language, either. It is worth mentioning that it is taught in over 160 universities worldwide.

When Europe speaks of diversity, it cannot only refer to diversity among nation states, but needs to also adopt the concept of profound diversity among European societies, of real diversity, and a first urgent step in this sense would be the official recognition of linguistic realities as solid and clear as that of Catalan, a language used daily by ten million Europeans.

Therefore, as an expression of modernity, Catalan, tied to opportunities for the future and linked at the same time to a very rich and centuries-old cultural tradition, is already part of mankind's collective heritage. Catalan as a language of social integration and cohesion, Catalan as a language for the new technologies, Catalan as a language to be shared—this is the heritage that Europe has to recognize and preserve.

We would feel more comfortable in such a European Union. In a social European Union, of the people, of labour, of the peoples and of culture. One of all its citizens, without exceptions. A European Union that also would recognize the right of self-determination not just of the citizens of countries that are not part of the Union, but also of those who are.

#News: On the Spanish cultural war against the Catalans and their language

Article by Antoni Ferrando

Recently some world press published horror stories about the profligate Catalans, as a threat for Spain, in the wider context of the euro crisis. Catalan budget for 2011, even with a hefty cut of 10 per cent, doesn't meet the deficit target. But this happens because that same Central Government that sets the target with one hand, blocks the funds to meet it with the other hand. Why do they do it? Probably the Catalans were expected to cut even more and demand less funding. But they will not, Catalan president Artur Mas visited Brussels recently to explain all this, and at the end of the day reality prevails: the Spanish government has still four fifths of the whole debt in its books.

That both governments, Spanish and Catalan, say they are doing the right thing, was to be expected. However, in the behaviour of the Spanish government, there are deep patterns of an irrational disrespect towards the Catalans. Irrational relative to the rational thing to do, from a State government point of view, which should be to keep the State as a working whole. Where does this irrational disrespect come from? Probably is a byproduct of a pervasive and all-encompassing ideology of Spanish nationalism, merged with the machinery of the State, regardless the ruling party of the moment. It shows in many fronts: if the awareness of the "otherness" of the Catalans remains unbearable, is because it source runs deep in the mind of the Spanish nationalist. One of the obvious signs of diveristy is the Catalan language, so it must be fought relentlessly.

In Catalonia the public basic school system works with a Catalan language immersion system, and the individual needs of students not fluent in Catalan are met individually. This arrangement effectively protects the Catalan language an avoids the social division that would create parallel schooling systems in several languages. Moreover, according to data of the Spanish Ministry of Education, the Spanish language skills of the Catalan kids are satisfactory. The European Commission praised the Catalan schooling system as a model for multilingual regions.

But reality be damned: three activist parents pursued their cause until the Spanish Supreme Court ruled (following last summer's Constitutional Court ruling) and ordered to introduce also Spanish as a second working language, and therefore the breakup of Catalan public schooling. However the rulings will be hardly enforceable: the support of the Catalans to a working school system is massive, with roughly a million students. The Constitutional Court itself is in a deep crisis, heavily controlled by the socialist (PSOE) and conservative (PP) Spanish parties, which as a matter of fact are two wings of a unique and virtual Spanish Nationalist Party.

Meanwhile, in Valencia, the new PP government has announced plans to dismantle schooling in Catalan and merge it with schooling in Spanish and English. Until now there were two lines, Catalan immersion and Spanish immersion but seeing that Catalan immersion was becoming more popular and its demand increasing year after year, currently more than 40% of parents were choosing it, could not be tolerated by the PP. There have already been massive protests against this ruling (link in Catalan).

Earlier this year the Valencian government blocked the reception of neighbouring Catalan Public television, with a totalitarian zeal more effective than any Chinese government. In times of a vast TV offer all around the world, people in Valencia are being deprived of a television channel widely popular just because it's in Catalan. Again, behind the move there was just more blatant Spanish nationalism, with its persistent unability to accept and recognize cultural diversity.

The long and consistent record of totalitarian inclinations of the Spanish nationalism, and its struggle against Catalan economy and culture, rule out any federal-like arrangement for the future of Spain and boost Catalan independentism.