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Spain Awards Pensions to Civil War Child Exiles
By Emma Ross-Thomas, Reuters
Spain
January 21, 2005
Spain's Socialist government took the historic step of recognizing Civil War exiles on Friday, granting pensions to hundreds of people who were evacuated as children to Russia and Latin America and never returned.
"In this way we want to recognize Spain's historic debt to these compatriots," Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega told a news conference.
A draft law approved in Friday's cabinet meeting now goes to parliament where it is expected comfortably to win approval.
During Spain's 1936-1939 Civil War between the leftist Republic and Nationalist forces led by General Francisco Franco some 3,000 children from Republican areas were sent to the former Soviet Union.
Some 240 remain in Russia, 33 in Ukraine and just five in Georgia. All are now in their 70s and 80s.
Hundreds more went to Mexico, Venezuela and Chile, where in total about 270 still live, the government said.
In Russia, evacuees were sent to children's homes. Many fought alongside Russian troops in World War Two, according to the Nostalgia Foundation that represents the so-called "war children" sent to the former Soviet Union.
President of the Nostalgia Foundation, Manuel Arce, 75, was sent to Russia aged eight, returning as a trained doctor at 38.
"The parents were in the Republican army and they thought it wouldn't be for long. But it went on for longer ... some people have been there 60 odd years," Arce said.
Franco ruled Spain as a dictatorship from the end of the Civil War until 1975, deterring many exiles from returning, although in 1956 the expatriates were awarded Soviet and Spanish nationality.
That year, almost 20 years after they were first evacuated, about 2,000 "war children" were shipped back to Spain from the Soviet Union, Arce said.
In the 1990s Spain awarded a basic pension to all Spanish emigrants abroad, but that only came to $120 a month in Russia, President of Moscow's Spanish Centre Francisco Mansilla said.
The new pension for the "war children" brings the payments to 6,090 euros ($7,912) a year and provides health care.
"We've always asked for this," Mansilla said. "With this benefit we can live better and also we can visit Spain."
After Franco's death Spain avoided confronting its divisive past, focusing instead on building a democracy.
But the Socialist government, in power since last year, has been keener to compensate the victims of the Civil War than its right-of-centre predecessor and set up a commission to investigate the condition of the victims of Franco's rule.
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