04/26/2008
Gernika commemorates today the 71st anniversary of the Bombing of this Biscayan town in the Basque Country by German air force leaded by general Franco with several events which include the prize giving ceremony of the 5th edition of Gernika Awards for Peace and Reconciliation.
According to the town council in Gernika, the Bombing commemoration events will start with the presentation of the book El Bombardeo de Gernika (The Bombing of Gernika) in Lizeo Antzokia Theater.
Later, there will be a meeting with Michel Janper, representative of Children of War association, and Johan Block, a member of Family of the executed in War collective.
The prize giving ceremony of the 5th edition of Gernika Awards for Peace and Reconciliation will also be celebrated in the morning which go to two people: One of them, the Basque army commander Cándido Seseta Etxebarria, died in February 1937 when he was attacking with his "gudaris" ( Basque soldiers) an enemy position trying to get Oviedo back for the Republic, and second to the Kenyan woman Dekha Ibrahim Abdi, awarded with the Alternative Nobel Prize 2007 after showing that religious and other kind of differences can be reconciled in several ethnic and cultural situations.
The events will continue in the afternoon and at 16:30 (coinciding with the moment when the bombing started over the town) a prayer for the dead and a floral offering for the people who died in the bombing will take place at the mausoleum of the cemetery in Zallo (Gernika). Among other important figures, institutional representatives and Basque politicians will be in this event.
According to the major of this town, José María Gorroño, "It will be a special day today, in which we will remember the hundreds of died and injured people who lived that horror, which marked us forever".
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