Clamp Down on Batasuna

Aznar may be gone, but his legacy is still providing scumbags like Baltasar Garzón with the perfect excuse to attack members of a political party and accuse them of working for ETA.

And after two years of "investigation" he backs up his hypothesis with theories, how professional of him.

Here is the note at Berria that depicts the last Garzonada:

Garzon charges 36 Batasuna members with being ETA members

In a 267-page indictment the judge confirms his hypothesis put forward in the 18/98 Case and includes all the organisations of the Basque National Liberation Movement within the armed organisation “in one way or another”

Aitziber Laskibar – BILBO

Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish National Criminal Court judge, issued his indictment yesterday on the 35/02 case relating to Batasuna and the Herriko Tabernas. In it Garzon pursues the same line of argument as in the legal proceedings instituted in the 18/98 Case and maintains that all the organisations within the Basque National Liberation Movement (ENAM) are, “in one way or another”, part of the armed organisation, On the basis of this argument Garzon has indicted 36 members of the HB, Euskal Herritarrok and Batasuna, accusing them of “being members of a terrorist organisation”. The indictment is 267 pages long and in it Garzon develops his arguments at length. The 36 people concerned have been summonsed to the Spanish National Criminal Court on Monday morning to have their charges read out to them.

Judge Garzon has also decided to maintain the precautionary measures which have hitherto been in place. So apart from the freezing of Batasuna’s accounts, the seizure of the Herriko Tabernas remains in force. The judge believes that the indictees committed crimes through the Herriko Tabernas, and that is why he deduces that they are ETA members.

The indictees also include members of the BAC-Basque Autonomous Community Parliament, but they cannot be indicted and tried by the National Criminal Court. So the Judge of the 5th Examining Court of the National Criminal Court has requested the High Court of the BAC to start proceedings against them.

Garzon has used two main arguments to say that Batasuna members are members of ETA: a political and an economic one. He says that in both these spheres all the organisations in the ENAM operate within “the same parameters” and that puts them all inside ETA. This argument begins with a sentence on the first pages of the indictment made public yesterday: “ETA has not only used HB, EH and Batasuna in the political and institutional sphere, it has also used them in the economic sphere for its funding.”

In the case against Batasuna, Garzon has included the same analysis that he made concerning the funding of the ENAM in the 18/98 Case, in the one against the Pro-Amnesty Committees (AAB), in the case against Haika and Segi (Basque nationalist left youth movements) and in the Udalbiltza case. He considers the AEK, the HB, the AAB and a number of companies to be “large companies” of the ENAM. He says that the stands (set up to sell refreshments during local fêtes), the sale of materials of the organisations, the membership fees and draws all constitute sources of funding for all of them.

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