Trapped in the Past

Scotland and Catalunya are two European nations with a strong sense of identity. Both have very long historic legacy. Their respective populations are very similar. And they share one more trait, their respective societies are not settling down for with the info we just enunciated, they want more, they want for their nations to achieve statehood, just like the English and the Spanish states. Then again, that's when they become really different from each other: while London seems to see as democratic "fair play" the possibility that the Scots make an statement regarding their independence in a referendum set for 2010, when it comes to Spain it takes just a consult that involves no more than 7,000 people for all the red lights to go off, something that includes judiciary vetoes and the Phalanx's street violence.

Yes, Madrid has real reasons to worry about. "El País" reminded its readers just yesterday that the polls in the Generalitat showed an increase of six points for those who support independence since 2005. And "La Vanguadia" stated that the street polls show that the support for independence could easily reach 40% if was actually an option on election day. More so, the pro-independence Catalans gathered yesterday in Arenys de Munt constantly shouted in support of Euskal Herria, where the polls throughout the last few years locate the support for independence above 30%, despite the frustrating fact that such option is not something that will be allowed any time soon.

To the self-determination exercise in Arenys the Spanish state answers by dispatching the Phalanx, a political party that has not been outlawed as opposed to those within the abertzale left (Batasuna, ANV, EHAK, D3M), and with a judicial ban directly inherited from the "Spain one, great and free". We have the very same recipes used almost a century ago on plain sight. A period in which the Spanish state has not only been unable to eliminate the pro-independence camp but has also been unable to offer any democratic alternatives.

Madrid is running out of time. The referendum in Arenys de Munt is undeniable proof that the pro-independence Catalans are more that ready to make Catalunya happen, and perhaps quite soon Euskal Herria too.

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No to Catalonian Self Determination

This note was published at Critics and Monsters:

Spanish court blocks vote on Catalonia independence

Barcelona- A court in Spain's north-eastern Catalonia region on Thursday blocked one village's planned referendum on independence for the state, judicial sources said. The vote had been called for September 13 by Arenys de Munt, a village of 8,000 near Barcelona. In a preliminary ruling, the Barcelona court accepted the appeal lodged by lawyers representing the Spanish state, who argued that only the state could stage referendums.

The villagers were to be asked whether Catalonia, a wealthy region of more than 6 million residents, should become an independent state within the European Union.

The referendum plan had sparked a national controversy, with the government fearing that it could become a precedent for other similar votes in the country beset with separatist currents.

Catalan top politicians have not followed the example of former Basque prime minister Juan Jose Ibarretxe, whose attempts to call a Basque vote on self-determination were foiled by the Spanish parliament and Constitutional Court.

¿Separatist currents?

Maybe the people at Monsters and Critics should learn about the international treaties protecting the right to self determination of the nations without statehood signed among others by Madrid and Paris.

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ETA Supports Political Resolution

The Basque pro-independence group ETA declared their support of a political resolution to the demand by the Basque society to its self determination after a period of "reflection."

"As an armed organisation, being effective and having an effective strategy becomes the focus and concern of our discussion," an ETA member told the pro-independence Basque newspaper Gara. "In this regard, before the summer, we will end a process of reflection and assembly, the aim of which is to establish an effective political-armed strategy," he said.

Two ETA members, identified as 'Gaueko' and 'Argi', were interviewed by Gara, which is often used by the group to release its statements. The newspaper translated the interviews into Spanish from the Basque language. Their statements came less than three weeks after Patxi Lopez, the regional leader of the Socialist Party that holds power in Madrid who was able to take over the position of lehendakari after the central government annuled 100,000 votes in an openly Apartheid-like strategy against the civil and political rights of the Basque people, thus, Patxi Lopez was inaugurated as the first Basque-phobe to rule the Basque Autonomous Community, a political entity that groups only three out of the seven Basque provinces.

Unlike his predecessor, Juan Jose Ibarretxe of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), Lopez rejects any negotiations with ETA and vows to increase the political violence that Madrid has imposed against the Basques. Gaueko told Gara that the Basque political situation is "very worrying, not because the PNV has lost its power, but because that power is in the hand of the Spanish fascist alliance."

The two ETA members also condemned the cooperation between France and Spain, which has led to the escalation of repressive measures against Basque activists. "A game is being played between what this Euskal Herria needs and what Spain and France needs," Gaueko said.

Spain, considered a fascist state many people around the world, has murdered thousands of Basques in its 8-century campaign of ethnic cleansing operations, bombings, massacres, razzias, pogroms and shootings for a colonial hold of the Basque homeland south of the Pyrinees.

ETA officially called off a 15-month ceasefire in June 2007, due to the lack of progress in tentative peace talks with the Socialist government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, an Spanish politician that derailed the peace process to prove his boss, francoist monarch Juan Calros Borbon, that him and the members of his political party loath the Basque people even more than the members of the extreme right Partido Popular.

You can read the article about this interview in Spanish here.

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Language Issues in Euskal Herria II

This is the follow up to an article published at the Portland Cultural Travel Examiner about the Basque language that we posted here a couple of days ago:

Tyler Sprecker

Language, identity and education policy in Spain’s Basque country: Part 2

As I mentioned in Part 1, the language debate taking place in the Basque Country of Spain is more than one about culture versus economy. The status of Basque as a language is tied closely to Basque nationalism and the fight for sovereignty. The Basque Country of Spain enjoys a great degree of autonomy from the rest of Spain, though not enough for Basque Nationalists who want nothing short of absolute sovereignty. While not representative of all Basque Nationalists, the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), a pro-independence terrorist organization, has been the darker face of the independence movement.

Although the separatist movement has lost some steam in recent years, it remains an important force in Spanish politics. Basque separatists have long argued for their right to self-determination as a separate ethnic group with their own language and culture. Surely a sovereign country retains the right to choose and promote its own language? Given the Basque country’s semi-autonomous status and current demographics, that has been a point of frustration for many.

Many native Spanish speakers in the Basque Country feel frustrated with the Basque language requirement for civil service jobs, arguing that some professionals such as doctors should be focusing their time and energy on learning about disease and medicine rather than a second language. Foreign language requirements have aroused public discontent in other regions of Spain as well. Protests were recently held in opposition of a government decision to make knowledge of Catalan mandatory for civil service jobs in the Cataluña region.

While not recognized as such by the federal government, Basque is a co-official language along with Spanish in the Basque Country of Spain. The Basque Country government strongly encourages bilingualism among its citizens. Under current policy all civil servants are required to speak Basque. The government has even taken to encouraging business owners to encourage their employees to learn Basque if they do not already know it. Educational policy is geared toward the same goal as well.

The Basque Country of Spain currently has three educational models from which parents are obliged to choose for their children. In Model A, all classes are taught in Spanish, except for language classes; Basque language classes are required. In Model B, some subjects are taught in Basque while others are taught in Spanish. In Model D, all classes are taught in Basque; Spanish language classes are required. In all three models English language classes are a required part of the curriculum. Some schools have even been testing a new trilingual education model where subjects are taught in Basque, Spanish and English. Over the past several years, the Basque Nationalist led government has been closing Model A schools due to reportedly low demand.

The need for bilingualism appears to be shared by many, though there is disagreement about the languages. Many native Spanish speakers see Basque as a language with marginal utility and would prefer their children to be taught English instead.

Public policy as it relates to language, however, may see some changes in light of recent political developments. After 30 years of governance by the Basque Nationalist Party (or by Basque Nationalist Party-led coalitions), the People’s Party (PP) – Spain’s main right-wing party, and the Socialist Party of the Basque Country (PSE) have formed a governing coalition that is set to begin governing starting mid-May of this year. Exactly what this means for language policy is yet to be seen, although a joint-statement of policy goals agreed to by both governing parties was recently issued.

The joint release clearly states the new government’s support for freedom of choice for parents among educational models. It also states the parties’ support for bilingualism as official government policy whereby all students are to be bilingual, though their parents retain the right to choose their educational path towards that end. Only time will tell if such policies will in effect create a bilingual citizenry. The only other question remaining is: Have they chosen the right languages?

I insist, seems like the author took many of his cues from that infamous article by Keith Johnson although it does a better job at keeping a more objective view on the issue.

And I insist, how dare any US citizen label any group as "terrorist" after all the crimes committed by the US military in Afghanistan, Irak and Pakistan?

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Language Issues in Euskal Herria I

I've got to tell you, ever since that infamous article about the Basque language by Basque-phobe Keith Johnson I cringe each time I find an article about this issue in an US media outlet. Here I present you one published at Examiner:

Tyler Sprecker

Language, identity and education policy in Spain’s Basque country: Part 1

Governing has never been so complicated. Political scientists the world over have been scratching their heads over the simultaneous integration and devolution of governments. The European Union has expanded to include 27 member countries and Asia has discussed development of a European Union-like structure while separatist movements from Quebec, Canada to the Tibet, China fight on for sovereignty. All the while, political and economic commentators from Benjamin Barber to Thomas Friedman have reflected on the effects of globalization and what it means for people around the world.

For many, it has meant having to balance economic and cultural survival. That struggle is evident in the Basque Country of Spain, where the regional government is feudally trying to weave a trilingual web of Basque, Spanish and English among its citizens, making education policy a hotly debated issue. This two part series will explore language in Spain’s Basque Country, education policy and the current debate.

Spain’s Basque Country is a semi-autonomous region on the northern coast of Spain near the French border and longtime home to the indigenous Basque people. In fact, Basque is believed to be the last remaining pre-Indo European language in Europe. Communities in the Basque region had enjoyed a great degree of autonomy until the late 18th-19th centuries. Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco (1892-1975) even went so far as to outlaw the Basque language, nullifying all legal documents recorded in the language and punishing those that dared speak it in public. Since the ratification of Spain’s 1978 Constitution, the Basque Country has been named a “historical region” and has been afforded a great degree of autonomy.

Unfortunately for many non-Basque speakers, the Basque government seems to have concluded that the best way to protect the Basque language is to force it onto others, and that may not be such a bad assessment. Language displacement has occurred in many parts of the world as dominant languages such as English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Arabic have spread. As a necessity for survival, speakers of the marginal languages are often forced to learn the dominant language of their respective regions, creating a generation (or several) of bilingual speakers that function as a bridge between their cultural past and the future of their children. Faced with economic marginalization, parents will often times raise their children in the dominant language but will not teach them their mother language, or if they do, the marginal utility of that language will not be sufficient so as to warrant its use by the younger generation who often times will abandon it completely. Left to evolutionary forces alone, many marginal languages will simply disappear as they are replaced by dominant ones. Simply permitting a given population to speak their native tongue does not guarantee that language’s survival. But is this a matter of survival for Basque speakers?

Perhaps not; there are an estimated 632,000 native Basque speakers (roughly double the number of Icelandic speakers). Aggregate numbers alone, however, do not tell the whole story. While the Basque people are largely confined to one geographic location, only an estimated one quarter of Basque region inhabitants speak Basque as a native language, and the region’s main center of commerce, Bilbao, is largely populated by native Spanish speakers, with native Basque speakers largely confined to the outskirts and surrounding areas.

But to frame the debate exclusively in terms of culture versus economy is to distort it. In Part 2, I will explore in further detail Basque Country politics and the identity debate.

Just one little detail, Euskara is not forced "onto others", the government of the Basque Autonomous Community can do nothing about having someone in Andalucia or the Canary Islands learning the language. The language policy is implemented only in the three Basque provinces it rules and all the inhabitants minus the inmigrants of these three provinces are supposed to be Basques.

If they don't feel Basque and they refuse to speak Basque they can always go to Spain and live their happy lives in a Spanish speaking environment, in the end, Spain is not awefully far from the Basque Country.

We'll wait and see what Tyler tells us in the second installment of the series.

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Eva

This bio about the great freedom fighter Eva Forest was published at ZNet:

Eva Forest: The Passing of a Spanish Icon

Supriyo Chatterjee

It was typical of Eva Forest, who died after an illness on May 19 at Hondarribia in Basque country, Spain, at the age of 79, to tell a friend days before her passing that she was living the best days of her life. A Left-wing icon whom the Spanish state could never silence nor smear, defiant till the very end of the harsh Spanish political system, and a great friend of Vietnam, Cuba and latterly of Venezuela and Bolivia, she is being remembered with great affection throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

Eva was born into a politically active family in Barcelona in 1928. Her painter father, an anarchist who felt that schools were a repressive institution, kept her at home for as long as he lived. It was some time after his death in 1936 that she set foot in a formal educational institute. That also was the year in which the civil war started and in 1939 Eva was at the point of being flown out to Russia from a nursery created with Swiss help for Spanish children, when her mother pulled her out of the truck moments before it set off towards the evacuation point.

Eva Forest gained a degree in psychiatry at Madrid and at the final year of her studies in 1955 she met and married Alfonso Sastre, playwright, essayist and a relentless critic of censorship lf the Franco era. They stayed together till the end, a couple who collaborated so closely in their work that they progressively thought and wrote alike.

With Aflonso's persecution in Spain, the couple left for Paris in 1956, where their first son was born. At this time, she moved away from psychiatry towards a "sui generis sociology" and wrote her first novel, Febrero. They returned to Spain in 1962 and she was detained after joining other women demonstrating in support of Asturian miners. She was fined, refused to pay it and was sent to prison with her new-born daughter.

In 1968, Franco imposed a state of emergency. Eva's response was to edit, along with her friends, a clandestine journal, Information, and the more widely circulated samizdat publication, State of Emergency. A Catalan by birth, her identification with the Basque cause started with characteristic fearlessness in 1970, when she was among those who worked to set up a solidarity committee during the farcical Burgos trial of 1970 against Basque prisoners, which ended with death sentences being handed out and later commuted following an international outcry. She was arrested in 1974 for writing under the pseudonym of Julen Agirre Operation Ogre, a book that detailed the car bomb assassination in 1973 by the Basque group, ETA, of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Spanish premier and Franco's most intimate collaborator. Eva was tortured and kept in preventive custody for three years, accused of collaborating with ETA, a charge never proven.

Her account of imprisonment, translated as From a Spanish Prison, shone light on the arbitrariness of the Spanish justice system and her own humanity and capacity for love for her children, her family and others amid great adversity. Prison was also the impulse for her to set up TAT, a group dedicated to working against torture, and to write extensively on the subject. As a torture victim herself, she campaigned till the very end against torture, ruing that despite years of all the work, it still tended to be common place.

After her release, the family moved to Basque country where Eva lived till the end. She aligned herself with the Basque Left and was at one time elected as a regional Senator on a Left ticket. She was also an incorrigible internationalist who could feel as her own the pain of others. We are responsible for own actions and our own silences, she said and Eva did not do silence. She visited Iraq in 1998 and wrote a book about it, 'Iraq, a Challenge to the New World Order?' She was intrigued by the anthropology of the 'new man' emerging in Cuba, interviewing peasants who learn for the first time to speak out in public and live in solidarity with others.

Eva Forest was a prolific writer, of novels and polemical reports on issues that were not profitable to commercial publishers. Since 1990 she kept herself busy with Hitu, her own publishing company that functioned on cooperative lines. She would edit, translate, pack and even sell books. The most eloquent homage to her is something she had written as an eulogy for one of her companions: "Pick up the sleep of our deaths and turn them into a creative arm that perforates impossibles and drills through utopia in search of new ways of speeding up the process of humanisation." Alfonso, her own companion of a lifetime, survives her and so does his little prophecy: "And one day, companion, we will return in triumph to the inhabited space that never was ours".

(Eva Forest 1928-2007)

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Iruñea's Proposal

This note was published at EiTB:

Batasuna present proposal to thousands of supporters in Iruña

Arnaldo Otegi presented his national approach including two proposals: one addressed to the French government about Iparralde and another addressed to the Spanish government about Hegoalde.

The Basque left nationalist movement presented on Saturday in the Basque town of Pamplona-Iruña (Navarre) their proposal for a "democratic framework for the Basque Country," during a meeting in which Batasuna's spokesman Arnaldo Otegi assured that "the final objective is to get – through agreement and negotiation – a Basque State, socialist and Basque speaking."

The meeting took place in the Anaitasuna Pavilion, full to bursting, and counted on the presence of important leaders of the outlawed Basque nationalist party Batasuna such as Arnaldo Otegi, Pernando Barrena and Juan Kruz Aldasoro, or Basque nationalist union leader Rafa Diez.

Otegi asked Spain's president Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to act with "political responsibility and historical ambition" to negotiate the autonomy proposal for Navarre and the Basque Country, and highlighted this is "the only reasonable alternative" for the "political conflict."

He also said the proposal for the creation of a new political region comprising Navarre and the Basque Country within the Spanish State is "the first step towards the national reconstruction and the path towards independence." He considered Navarre as "the Basque Country’s pillar." "Without Navarre we can't do anything," he added.

The proposal, recently announced by the pro-independent movement, includes the creation of one political region formed by the Basque Autonomous Region (Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, Alava) and Navarre and another political region formed by the three Basque provinces of Iparralde (northern part of the Basque Country, situated within the French State), and a plan for the solution of the conflict through self-determination.

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ETA Supports Peaceful Negotiation

The pro-independence Basque group ETA says it is prepared to enter political dialogue with the Spanish government. It says it had adopted proposals put forward two months ago by Batasuna. The proposals include a referendum for the Basque country on whether to remain part of Spain or go its own way. But Spain's main political parties have already rejected the Batasuna proposals, because they seek to perpetuate the genocidal and violent occupation of Nabarra. Batasuna called in November for "exclusively political and democratic" talks to "take the conflict off the streets".

An ETA statement, published in the Basque newspaper Gara on Sunday, said the group was "perfectly willing to take part in a process of those characteristics", and that it was "essential that the whole society has a chance to participate in such a process". It said the proposal was "the most solid political contribution yet proposed in the face of the conflict between the Basque Country and the occupying states".

But Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero says there can be no dialogue without a ceasefire first as a lame excuse to set up obstacles to peace. Responding on Sunday to ETA's press statement, Spain's Defence Minister Jose Bono said: "You can't talk to someone with a gun in his hand... Nobody sensible can sit down with these people.", strangely enough, he leads thousands of people with at least a gun on their hands.

The Spanish government has been blamed for dozens of thousands of deaths since the 1100s in its murderous campaign to invade and colonize Nabarra, the Basque homeland.

At the same time as it called for peace, the ETA communique claimed responsibility for 23 attacks - none of them fatal - carried out in Spain since September last year. But it denied it was behind a 12 December bomb hoax during a football match between Real Madrid and Basque side Real Sociedad at Madrid's Bernabeu stadium, which forced the match to be abandoned and 70,000 spectators evacuated.

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A Secular Bishop

There is those within the Catholic Church that understand that there is not reason why this institution should pronounce itself in regards of the Basque self determination in general and the Plan Ibarretxe in particular.

It is only the more reactionary sectors of the Catholic Church the ones that tend to position themselves on the side of those who are still clinging to past glories in Spain.

Here is a note about what a Basque Bishop has to say regarding the reaction of the Opus Dei:

Bishop Uriarte says Church cannot judge proposal from moral standpoint

He was responding to the declarations made by the Spanish Bishops’ Conference with respect to the Basque Autonomous Community Government’s Statute Proposal

Editorial Staff – DONOSTIA (San Sebastian)

In a letter made public yesterday Juan Maria Uriarte, the Bishop of Donostia (San Sebastian), said passing judgement on the recently approved New Statute Proposal of the BAC Government was not one of his ecclesiastical duties. “I do not have sufficient motives to give a moral assessment which would involve the Church’s authority,” said the Bishop in his letter.

The aim of the Bishop’s letter was to respond to the declaration the Spanish Bishops’ Conference had made the day before yesterday about the BAC Government’s proposal. In a statement put out the day before yesterday the Spanish Bishops’ Conference in fact fiercely criticised the New Statute Proposal, Basque nationalism and independence as options. Uriarte said it was not one of the Bishop’s duties “to determine the juridical or political nature of the text or to impose limits on how far the proposal should go”.

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Press Release from BIC

We received this information via email:

Dear sympathisers of BIC,

Hereby we sent you our analysis of the peace proposal of Batasuna. On our website we will pay attention to reactions etc in the coming days. Please check also our site for the monthly digital BIC-Newsletter for updates on news from the Basque Country and the left independence movement. Please check our website for our monthly English newsletter about Euskal Herria. You can find it at ‘Read the news in English!’

Greetings

Baskenland Informatie Centrum (BIC)

Now the people! Now the peace!

Sunday 14 November the, by the Spanish authorities banned Basque political party Batasuna, did for an audience of 15.000 people a proposal for the ending of the political and cultural status of Euskal Herria. The proposal was received negatively by Spanish government, media and political parties because the lack of an explicit call to ETA to lay down their weapons. The BIC however sees this proposal as an historical step towards an end of the violence in the region, while at the same time there is a step taken towards a final solution of the political conflict.

History

Shortly after the death of Franco a wide range of organisations within the Basque independence movement proposed the so-called KAS- alternative. This proposal bares some political demands as the recognition of the self-determination, one Autonomy-statute for all Southern Basque provinces (including Naffaroa), withdrawal of the Guardia Civil etc. If these demands were met, ETA would have laid down the arms. In addition to the KAS-alternative it was tried to find the solution of the conflict in direct negotiations between ETA and the Spanish state. After the peace talks between them in Algeria in the end of the eighties failed, the KAS-alternative in this form came to an end.

In 1995 ETA made a new proposal, called the Democratic Alternative. Here ETA distinguishes in things that have to be dealt with inside Basque society and things that had to be negotiated between ETA and the Spanish government. ETA saw it as her main issue to guard, if necessary with violence, that Spain accepted the will of the Basque people, while she stated she didn’t want to be a violent part of the democratic process to come to that will. The emphasis was thus now at the recognition of the right on self-determination of the Basque people. ETA demanded that Spain first would have to recognise this right and then they would lay down their weapons to make way for a process in which the content of the right on self-determination (independence, autonomy, centralism etc) would get a prominent place and would be peaceful an democratically argued. The response of the Spanish authorities to this proposal was to prosecute the board of Batasuna (then Herri Batasuna) for promoting this proposal. The entire board was in prison for one and a half years, before being acquitted in appeal.

With the Lizarra declaration a majority of the Basque parties seemed to make a start for the resolution by dialogue among each other, without Spain of France, of the political conflict. However the Democratic Alternative foresaw in an acceptance of the outcome of such a dialogue by Spain, the developments were for ETA as such that they decided for a cease-fire. ETA ended this 14-month long period because they believed the other Basque parties were not enough serious in participating in this dialogue.

The declaration of Anoeta

Batasuna believes that the struggle they staged for the last 25-year has developed in a state of mind that almost everybody in the Basque Country has the opinion that the current political status has to be changed to reach a definitive settlement. And Batasuna thinks that a final solution only can be reached by consulting the Basque population on the outcome of a dialogue. For this reason Batasuna now puts the peace in the Basque Country forward as most important issue. She wants to move the conflict from the street to the negation table, in her own words. According to Batasuna this is only possible through a process of multilateral dialogue, flexible and without a hurry. This dialogue has to be accompanied by some obligations. Batasuna commits herself to the following deals and asks the other protagonists in the Basque political arena to commit themselves also to these points:

1. The promise to go to the roots of the conflict with the aim to look for a democratic way out.

2. The promise that the decisions of the Basque citizens are respected. All citizens of the Basque citizens have the right to be consulted. This means that the future as well as the current political status has to be ratified by the population.

3. The promise that such a consult can only be held under peaceful and democratic circumstances. Batasuna will do the utmost necessary to achieve that.

4. The promise that a deal recognises the history as well as the current political reality in the Basque Country. A deal has to be supported and respected by different political spheres in the Basque Country.

5. The promise that differences of opinion during the process are to be solved in a peaceful and democratic way.

6. The promise that the use of exclusive political and democratic methods makes it possible for all political projects to be realisable without ant limitation.

7. The promise that in the agreement to be reached the rights as they have been written in the human rights laws of 1966 are to be implemented.

Batasuna thinks that the dialogue has to be on two terrains:

~ On one side between the different parties in the Basque Country. A deal has to be made about the wished political status of the Basque Country, which result has to be ratified by the Basque population and the next step is that the deal has to be negotiated with the Spanish and French states.

~ On the other side between ETA and the Spanish and French state there has to be a deal about demilitarisation, prisoners, deportees and refugees, and the victims of the violence.

Analysis

The declaration of Anoeta differs from some important points of earlier proposals en statements and means a remarkable change in the strategy of the left independent movement.

~ At first strikes that the before mentioned peace proposals were always (partly) done by ETA, while this proposal is done by a political party. For the first time in the independence movement not ETA but Batasuna takes the first ideological step.

~ Also it is remarkable that the proposal is not aimed at a certain result, as the KAS-alternative, but it promotes a procedure to come to a, whatever, result.

~ Batasuna calls for the commitment to a non-violent democratic process and calls on others, also on ETA, to do the same.

~ The negotiation space between ETA and the Spanish and French state is limited to demilitarisation, prisoners, deportees and refugees, and victims of violence. For the ending of the armed struggle are not, on contrary with the KAS-alternative and the Democratic Alternative, put any political demands.

~ And the right on self-determination is included in the demands for recognition of the human right treaties of 1966.

~ Also the declaration says to have respect for all political spheres and that a deal has to be respected by all these spheres.

~ And last but not least, the declaration states that there has to be dealt with the current political reality, a clear reference to the institutional split of the Basque Country in different regions and states. Batasuna always declared this reality as ‘imposed’.

Conclusion

The overall Spanish response to this proposal not being worthwhile because ETA is not called to ‘stop existing’ is not giving credit to the proposal. Organisations like ETA does not stop to exist as simple as that, also not because there are still 700 prisoners in Spanish and French jail suspected of connections with ETA. The current proposal is putting the standards for the ending of the armed conflict so low, that we can speak of a break through. ETA and the state are called upon to end the armed conflict, where they have to deal with logistic points. You can think of an (partial) amnesty, reduce of sentences, social reintegration or at least and end to the dispersion of prisoners and a return to prisons in the Basque Country.

Batasuna points out in her declaration that they wish for the resolution of the conflict in a peaceful and democratic manner. Some weeks ago ETA declared that they would do everything that is necessary for the peaceful solution of the conflict. It wouldn’t surprise us that ETA will announce a cease-fire on short notice. If the Spanish and French states are even then not willing to talk with ETA for a final solution, BIC only can conclude that both states are apparently not willing to end the conflict. The juridical procedure that the Spanish Public Prosecutor started against the organisers of the public meeting where the peace proposal was presented has to be seen as attempts to continue the conflict on the old terms.

Baskenland Informatie Centrum (BIC), 19 November 2004

BIC
PoBox 2884 3500 GW Utrecht
The Netherlands
www.baskinfo.org
info@baskinfo.org

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