SOME European parliaments will observe a minute’s silence on Tuesday, the 70th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War. But there is unlikely to be much silence in Spain.

After decades in which the war was never mentioned, Spaniards are at last talking about the pivotal event. The debate over what happened seven decades ago is proving painful and divisive, reopening wounds that never fully healed. But some believe it is vital.

“This is the first time there’s ever been a proper debate about the civil war,” says Antony Beevor, author of The Battle of Spain. “The wound has to be aired, otherwise it’s going to continue to fester.”

Spain’s three-year civil war, which began in 1936 with an uprising by General Francisco Franco, cost an estimated 500,000 lives. Most were the result of mass killings by both sides. After the war, Franco’s Nationalist troops rounded up suspected Republicans and killed thousands. Many were sent to labour camps and their children were given away.

Sometimes called the “first war of the Second World War”, Spain’s conflict became a proxy for the global clash between communism and fascism. Germany and Italy backed Franco’s coup against the elected “Popular Front” Government, and practised techniques later used in the world war. Germany’s bombing of Guernica foreshadowed the Blitz. Stalin’s Soviet Union backed the ill- organised Republican government.

It was not until the generalissimo’s death in 1975 that democracy returned to Spain, with a peaceful seen as a model for other countries. But the price of democracy was silence. No generals stood trial; there was no truth and reconciliation commission..

The civil war’s victors gave up power, and the vanquished were expected not to seek redress for the horrors of Franco’s regime. With the economy booming and freedoms blossoming, the sides entered a tacit “pact of forgetting”.

“Some claim that we had a model transition,” José Antonio Martín Pallín, a Supreme Court judge, wrote recently. “In my opinion, the wounds were hurriedly sewn up using thick thread, and inevitably left scars.”

The agreement began to unravel in 2000, when the descendants of some Republicans killed during the war began to dig up mass graves and give their lost ones a proper burial. The then-conservative government vigorously opposed any state funding of exhumations, saying that disturbing the graves would stir up old hatreds.

But the tide could not be turned back. Hundreds of graves all over Spain have been opened, and history has come flooding out.

The Socialist Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose own grandfather was executed by Nationalists, has decisively broken with the “pact of forgetting”. Señor Zapatero has praised the short-lived Second Republic that Franco overthrew and last month declared 2006 the year of “the recovery of historical memory”.

The Government has been gathering documents about the period from all over the world and plans to open them to the public. His Government is also to introduce a law recognising the suffering of Franco’s victims.

His moves have enraged conservatives, who accuse the Socialists of practising the “politics of vengeance”.

“Contrary to what Zapatero says, Spaniards do not look back on the Second Republic with recognition and satisfaction,” the monarchist newspaper ABC fulminated. “Many people renounced their own memories as winners and do not now deserve to have the losers impose theirs.”

Right-wing historians have produced revisionist histories blaming the Left for the war. Most mainstream historians dismiss their claims as propaganda, but the Right’s drive to prevent the Left from writing Spain’s history gathers pace.

Posters appeared this week in Madrid saying “There is another memory” and urging Spaniards to demonstrate in support of the largely defunct Falangists, the party that was responsible for mass killings of leftists. “Proud to be Spanish!” said another, bearing the yoke and arrows that was the Falangist’s symbol.

Some fear that delving into the past will cause the re-emergence of the so-called “Two Spains”. Conservatives say that the fragile balance between two sides has been upset and the country risks being torn apart. But most think Spanish democracy is now mature enough to debate its past.

“Sooner or later,” says Alejandro Quiroga, a lecturer in Spanish politics at Newcastle University, “the Spanish are going to have to deal with their past. Otherwise, it’s going to be very difficult to move on.”

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