New Opportunities for Peace

Today at Berria English:

Experts focus on “new opportunities” for peace at start of conference

Led by Juan Jose Ibarretxe, the President of the Basque Autonomous Community Government, and Joseba Azkarraga, the Minister for Justice, the conference on “The Human Right to Peace” attended by international experts on conflict has commenced in Donostia

Gurutze Izagirre – Donostia (San Sebastian)

“There are new opportunities for peace.” At least that was the idea put across by Nancy Soderberg and Federico Mayor-Zaragoza, the guests of honour at the 1st International Conference on the Human Right to Peace Conference, when they appeared in Donostia (San Sebastian) yesterday. Both of them transmitted the idea that violence was a thing of the past and that the future was dialogue. They added that by holding this conference in Donostia, they were transmitting a direct message to the players in the Basque conflict. “The time has come to put an end to violence and look towards the future,” said Soderberg and Mayor-Zaragoza.

The aim of the conference organised by the Justice Department of the Basque Autonomous Community Government is to reflect on the human right to peace. For this purpose over a hundred experts in international conflicts have come from 22 countries and are in Donostia taking part in the conference. The presentations were held in the Kursaal centre in Donostia and that is where the talks will be taking place until Saturday. The Basque Government Justice Department will be gathering the conclusions that come out of it to transmit them to the UN.

Joseba Azkarraga gave the opening speech and stressed that it was “a debate that could not be put off”. He felt it was “indispensable” that peace based on justice should be sought, in order to put an end to violence. “Peace is not simply the absence of violence; on the contrary, it has to be built on rights on a political, social, economic and cultural level, it has to be based on the dignity of people and countries, if it is to last,” he said.

To achieve this he said new ways had to be found to manage conflicts, if one wanted to put an end to the atmosphere that fed these conflicts.”

Juan Jose Ibarretxe, the Lehendakari (President) of the Basque Government, made a reference to the Spanish Prime Minister in the first part of his speech. Zapatero had declared the day after he won the elections that you could not fight violence with war but that you had to get to the bottom of it and solve the reasons that lay behind it. Ibarretxe held the view that these words of Zapatero responded to a new interpretation of conflicts, and to the Basque conflict, too. Ibarretxe announced that a new era had been ushered in after Zapatero’s election victory.

So he called on politicians to be daring and to take steps towards peace. He went on to call for ETA’s disappearance; “not just Basque society, but more and more people within Batasuna, too, are asking for a permanent cease-fire,” he added. If it did not disappear, he predicted that it would be very difficult to make progress together on any kind of project.

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