After three years of being banned by the Government of fascist Jose Maria Aznar, Juan Jose Ibarretxe, the Prime Minister of the Basque Autonomous Community was receive by Spain's new Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
Rodriguez Zapatero was nice enough to even display an Ikurrina along with he Spanish flag outside of the Presidential Palace of La Moncloa, something never done before.
On his first official visit to Madrid in three years, Ibarretxe took the opportunity to present his new plan that would revamp the relationship between Gazteiz and Madrid. Rodriguez Zapatero may have been nice enough to display an Ikurrina (a flag that was called "terrorist banner" by an Argentinean rightist news paper last week) but his position regarding the Plan Ibarretxe is the same as Aznar's, according to them it is an attack on the Constitution, the Spanish Constitution that is.
It is this position, or rather opposition to a peaceful and negotiated solution to the conflict that had Aznar ordering his underlings to produce banners last March that read "With the victims, with the Constitution, against terrorism" when him and his officials at the PP wanted to pin the bombings in Madrid on Basque nationalism as to kill to birds with one rock. First, to continue to deny the Basques their right to self determination, and second, to take the attention of the public off the boneheaded support of Aznar for the war on Iraq.
Ibarretxe told Rodriguez Zapatero that on the issue of their self determination the Basques must decide and he made a plight to continue with his project and to call for a referendum in which the Basques are allowed to express their opinion. The plan has room for improvement even from the Basque point of view, just recently Arnaldo Otegi of the nationalist left has pledged his will to sit down and negotiate with the other political forces in the Basque Autonomous Community.
Hopefully something good will come out from all this.
Rodriguez Zapatero was nice enough to even display an Ikurrina along with he Spanish flag outside of the Presidential Palace of La Moncloa, something never done before.
On his first official visit to Madrid in three years, Ibarretxe took the opportunity to present his new plan that would revamp the relationship between Gazteiz and Madrid. Rodriguez Zapatero may have been nice enough to display an Ikurrina (a flag that was called "terrorist banner" by an Argentinean rightist news paper last week) but his position regarding the Plan Ibarretxe is the same as Aznar's, according to them it is an attack on the Constitution, the Spanish Constitution that is.
It is this position, or rather opposition to a peaceful and negotiated solution to the conflict that had Aznar ordering his underlings to produce banners last March that read "With the victims, with the Constitution, against terrorism" when him and his officials at the PP wanted to pin the bombings in Madrid on Basque nationalism as to kill to birds with one rock. First, to continue to deny the Basques their right to self determination, and second, to take the attention of the public off the boneheaded support of Aznar for the war on Iraq.
Ibarretxe told Rodriguez Zapatero that on the issue of their self determination the Basques must decide and he made a plight to continue with his project and to call for a referendum in which the Basques are allowed to express their opinion. The plan has room for improvement even from the Basque point of view, just recently Arnaldo Otegi of the nationalist left has pledged his will to sit down and negotiate with the other political forces in the Basque Autonomous Community.
Hopefully something good will come out from all this.
Ibarretxe in Madrid
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