Catalan referendum: Clashes as voters defy Madrid

Police officers are preventing people from voting, and seizing ballot papers and boxes at polling stations. In the regional capital Barcelona, witnesses said police had fired rubber bullets during pro-referendum protests.

Thirty-eight people have been injured, most of them lightly, say Catalan emergency services. Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont condemned the action of federal police. “The unjustified use of violence… by the Spanish state will not stop the will of the Catalan people,” he told reporters.

The ballot papers contain just one question: “Do you want Catalonia to become an independent state in the form of a republic?” There are two boxes: Yes or No.

Ahead of the polls opening, the Catalan government said voters could print off their own ballot papers and use any polling station if their designated voting place was shut.

In the town of Girona, riot police smashed their way into a polling station where Mr Puigdemont was due to vote.

Television footage showed them breaking the glass of the sports centre’s entrance door and forcibly removing those attempting to vote.

However, Mr Puigdemont was still able to cast his ballot at another polling station.

Since Friday, thousands of separatist supporters had occupied schools and other buildings designated as polling stations in order to keep them open.

Many of those inside were parents and their children, who remained in the buildings after the end of lessons on Friday and bedded down in sleeping bags on gym mats.

In some areas, farmers positioned tractors on roads and in front of polling station doors, and school gates were taken away to make it harder for the authorities to seal buildings off.

Referendum organisers had called for peaceful resistance to any police action. It began in the dark and the rain. Daniel, who arrived at his local school at 01:00 and slept in the street outside, said his grandfather would have been proud of him.

He and hundreds of others blocked the entrance for several hours before this polling station opened.

Suddenly there was silence. Two officers from Catalonia’s regional police force had arrived. But a human wall was formed, and the police left.

National Spanish riot police arrived at another polling station nearby in Barcelona but again, people there kept them back.

One witness said there were scuffles and showed me a photo of a middle-aged woman with a bloody face. But inside the school sports hall, there is a mood of celebration as people take selfies as they cast their votes.

Catalonia’s former President, Artur Más – the man in charge when Catalan nationalists really started pushing for a referendum – told me that people were voting peacefully in the face of “a violent Spanish state”.

Article source: http://www.suchtv.pk/world/item/60718-catalan-referendum-clashes-as-voters-defy-madrid.html