Sunday, September 14, 2008

Sloppy News Coverage

My goodness!

Talk about some sloppy news coverage regarding the current events in Euskal Herria.

I would like for you to start by reading this article published at Monsters & Critics:

Police clash with Basque protesters in northern Spain

Europe News
Sep 14, 2008, 14:46 GMT

Madrid - Police clashed with Basque separatists during a protest march in the northern Spanish city of San Sebastian on Sunday, media reports said.

Police fired rubber bullets after some of the marchers pelted the officers with stones, the reports said. Two people were arrested.

The clashes erupted after police tried to stop the march, which was called by an organization seeking an amnesty for jailed members of the Basque separatist movement ETA.

Authorities had earlier banned the march.

On Thursday, Spain's top court ruled that a plan by the Basque regional government to stage a referendum-like vote on the self- determination for the northern region was unconstitutional.

The Basque parliament had approved holding the vote on October 25, but the Spanish government and opposition conservatives lodged a complaint with the Constitutional Court.


Anyone that reads the article would think that all the events described in the article are related when in reality they are two diametrically separated incidents.

The police force mentioned in the first part of the article is the Ertzaintza, the Basque regional police. The Basque regional police acted on orders of an authoritarian individual by the name of Javier Balza who is the mastermind behind a campaign of repression by the government of the Basque Autonomous Community against the part of the Basque society generally associated with the pro-independence left.

Which takes us to the second part of the article, it is that same government of the Basque Autonomous Community the one that got its proposal rejected by the Spanish Constitutional Court.

You get it now? The bully in the first part of the article and the victim in the second part of the article are one and the same, the government of the Basque Autonomous Community.

So, while Madrid supresses the rights of the entire Basque people, some Basque politicians supress the rights of a certain sector of the Basque people.

This is why a peace process is needed, but one in which the international community will make sure that Spain will not resort to its old tricks and that a true disposition to a peaceful resolution of the conflict will be the driving force so once and for all the Basque people can enter the international arena as a free and sovereign nation.

As for the article, Monsters & Critis should know better than to depend on the Spanish Ministry of Propaganda to get its information about what is going on in Euskal Herria.

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