Al Jazeera and Euskal Herria

EITb publishes a note regarding the visit of a reporter from the media outlet Al Jazeera, here it is:

Politics

"Basque Battles"

Al Jazeera's news report analyzes Basque conflict

10/25/2007

A journalist working for the Qatar TV station has spent some days in the Basque Country interviewing politicians, victims of ETA and relatives of ETA inmates.

Qatari TV station Al Jazeera broadcast last October 10th a wide report on the political situation in the Basque Country.

Entitled "Basque Battles," the research programme People and power takes as starting point the recent arrest and imprisonment of most of the senior members of the banned Basque leftist party Batasuna. Juliana Ruhfus, a journalist working for Al Jazeera, interviewed in the Basque Country leftist and conservative politicians, victims of ETA attacks and relatives of ETA inmates.

The report, which is made of two 15-minute long videos, analyzes the situation in the Gipuzkoan town of Lizartza, where the conservative party PP won the local election May 27th with 27 votes and a leftist platform, which had been barred from standing, had 186 votes. There were also 142 blank votes and the rest of political parties decided not to stand in the vote.

Ruhfus interviews the current mayor Regina Otaola (PP), the former mayor, José Antonio Mintegui, and Maider Agirrenabarrena, candidate for the outlawed leftist platform. "Batasuna is a terrorist organization and ANV is its successor. If Batasuna takes control of the town, this would become the Nazi Germany", Otaola says.

The interviews to ETA's victims include the statements of Gorka Landaburu, a journalist who was victim of an ETA's attack, and Pilar Elias, widow of Ramón Baglieto, a conservative councilor murdered by the armed group in 1980.

The report reflects the situation of the relatives of the ETA inmates and shows one of the rallies that the amnesty group Askatasuna calls every month's last Friday to ask for the imprisonment of Basque inmates in Basque prisons and not in far-away Spanish prisons.

Julen Madariaga, one of the founders of ETA, explains in an interview the creation of the armed group, its evolution and the current situation. According to Madariaga, "ETA is at one end, the PP at the other end and the Basque society in the middle.

At the end of the report, Al Jazeera calls on its viewers to give their opinion on its web site about "the fate of the Basques."

It is amazing how low the Partido Popular members can go, this Otaola lady conveniently forgets that it was his party's predecessors the ones that allied themselves to the Nazis. On top of it, today she is mayor of Lizartza because Madrid imposed her through electoral fraud when it used an less than democratic law against the opposition.

I wonder what will be the result of the poll by Al Jazeera regarding "the fate of the Basques".

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