Past isn't the past - Spain's debate over its long past civil war shows that memories, like bodies, need a proper burial

Thirty-one years after the death of Gen. Francisco Franco, Spaniards face a painful, but privileged, dilemma: how to lay to rest their long-past Civil War.

Last week, Spain's Parliament began intense debate for the first time on a bill that would compensate Franco's victims. In 1936 the dictator rebelled against Spain's elected Socialist government, launching a three-year conflict that would kill 500,000 Spaniards. Tens of thousands were killed under his subsequent rule. Today, an estimated 30,000 of Franco's victims lie in unmarked mass graves.

The bill would confront some of these historic wrongs -- wrongs that were rarely spoken of publicly even after Franco's demise. After the Civil War, Spaniards spoke relatively little of the past atrocities, terrorized first by Franco and then by a more subtle fear that confronting the past could drag apart a reunited society.

A new generation that has grown up without dictatorship is challenging that, though. Their efforts to find relatives' graves have galvanized older Spaniards including President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. Himself the grandson of a Franco victim, Zapatero launched the bill now under debate.

The law would allow victims or their families to claim reparations from a $26.4 million fund. It would ban references and symbols of Franco's regime in public buildings. And it would, under one proposed amendment, let descendants of those persecuted by Franco request official declarations of the injustice done to them.

Few in Parliament think the bill really addresses Spain's past. How could it? Some find it too limited and call for an amendment to overturn Franco-era trial verdicts. Spain's conservative Popular Party says the legislation revives old injuries and reverses Spain's new forward momentum. Too, they point out, both sides in the war were guilty of inhuman crimes.

Franco's regime, however, murdered tens of thousands more, robbed Spaniards of their rights to bury their dead as tradition demands, and bludgeoned a democracy into 34 years of paralysis and backwardness. If the bloody 20th century taught anything, it was that such national traumas can never be fully repressed.

Pulling down statues and outlawing historical references won't undo that damage. But discussion -- including governmental review -- and symbolic acts such as reparations can add another ending to tragic national stories. They establish officially the new society's values and commitment to justice. Precisely which symbols to choose is for Spaniards to decide. As they do, they can count themselves lucky that they've built a society that can debate such deep questions peacefully.