Garry Kasparov rose to fame as one of the best chess players in history. Since retiring, he has made a second career as a political activist. An outspoken opponent of Vladimir Putin, he's chairman for the Human Rights Foundation as well as the founder and chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), an American political organization promoting and defending liberal democracy in the USA and abroad. Yesterday evening, in his role as an activist, he made a comment on Twitter on the situation in Catalonia.
Kasparov was born and grew up in the USSR, in what is now Azerbaijan. In his comment yesterday on Twitter, he said that "jailing your citizens for political protest makes everything worse. It is what happens in authoritarian nations."
Later, he retweeted the first post in a viral Twitter thread by BBC journalist Jean Mackenzie, who was covering the protests in Barcelona on Tuesday night as tensions between demonstrators and police spilled over into unrest.
Given the controversy sparked by Kasparov's remarks, he later posted that the issue is "too important and complicated for a tweet", for which reason he wrote a longer post on Facebook (click below to read the whole post). In it, he acknowledges that "my comments do not come from expertise in Spanish politics [...], I am speaking as an outsider with historical perspective on where the current road leads."
Kasparov goes on to say: "I want to encourage the Spanish government to learn from history and to realize that they must seek a peaceful, democratic solution. Instead, criminalizing political movements and creating martyrs leads to the conditions for a real revolutionary movement, and violence begets violence. You cannot call a movement with peaceful goals supported by millions of free people a 'coup de etat' as some have done. Jailing leaders who tried to realize the desires of those millions, and calling them traitors, has only inflamed the situation."
He recommends that Spain look to how UK and Canada have handled the independence movements in Scotland and Quebec respectively, adding: "For the other extreme, look only at how Turkey and Iraq have treated the separatist Kurds. That cannot be the road for Spain and Catalonia."