Late Spanish dictator Franco stripped of degree

MADRID, Nov 10 (Reuters) A Spanish university today said it would posthumously withdraw an honorary doctorate it awarded to dictator Francisco Franco, in the latest episode in a heated nationwide debate about the country's violent history.

The University of Santiago de Compostela in the same northern region of Galicia where Franco was born, said in a news release the dictator lacked the ''scientific and personal merits'' for the doctorate it awarded when he still ruled in 1965.

Franco led a military uprising against Spain's left-wing Republican government in 1936, beginning a civil war which killed hundreds of thousands and was dictator from 1939 until his death in 1975.

Despite three decades of democracy, many Spaniards are still bitterly divided about the rights and wrongs of the war and Franco regime, despite the gradual disappearance of statues and street names recording the old general.

The debate has become increasingly bitter since Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose grandfather was killed by Franco's forces, won elections in 2004.

The divide has even begun a bizarre competition among rival newspapers to publish obituaries of people killed seven decades ago by the different sides fighting the war.

Right-wing newspaper El Mundo has published obituaries of victims of Republican forces, and left-wing El Pais has published obituaries remembering those killed by Franco's troops.

REUTERS SB RAI2242