No Comments, Guilty Silence

I fully understand when people decide not to comment on my posts related to the Basque struggle for self-determitation. It irritates me because years from now when the Spanish regime finally decides to launch an ethnic cleansing campaign in Euskal Herria it is going to be only then when the "righteous" people of the world are going to cry foul play, just like what they did when it came to the Bosnians and the Kurds (Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar just issued a threat stating that he will expell the Basques from Spain and from Europe, pretty much what Slobodan Milosevic said about Croats, Bosnians and Albanians).

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Denouncing Violation of Rights

Today at Berria:

American Lawyers Guild denounces violation of rights

It has called on the United States Government to ask Spain to “respect the rights of Basque citizens”

Imanol Murua Uria – DONOSTIA (San Sebastian)

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) has asked the State Department of the United States to request the Spanish Government “to respect the rights of Basque citizens.” The forum of 4,000 progressive lawyers of America has just held its yearly National Convention in Minneapolis, and has adopted a resolution denouncing the violation of certain basic rights in the Basque Country by the Spanish Government. The resolution will be forwarded to the United States State Department. The text approved in Minneapolis draws attention to the closing down of the newspapers Egin and Egunkaria, the outlawing of the political party Batasuna, and the complaints of torture, and calls on the United States Government directly “to ask the Spanish Government to respect the rights of Basque citizens as guaranteed in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.” This resolution points out that the UN Charter establishes the right “not to be subjected to torture, inhuman or degrading treatment and not to be arbitrarily arrested” and the right to the presumption of innocence. It likewise calls on the United States Government to request the Spanish Government to uphold “the freedom of opinion and expression of Basque citizens, including the right to disseminate information and ideas through the media.”

The resolution adopted last weekend has its origins in the work conducted by a group of delegates that was in the Basque Country and Spain from September 26 to October 1. In fact, a working group made up of members of the NLG and the European Association of Democratic Lawyers conducted interviews in Madrid and in the Basque Country to investigate the breach of international agreements on human rights that has taken place. In Madrid they saw Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish National High Court judge, and Maria Garcia, the deputy secretary of the Ministry of Justice, among others, and in the Basque Country they met with Martxelo Otamendi, chief editor of BERRIA, Mertxe Aizpurua, Gara’s editor, representatives of the Lawyers Guild of Bizkaia and the “Eskubideak” (Rights) Lawyers Association.

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ELA : Pact is Needed

Today at Berria:

ELA union calls for minimum pact of those in favour of self-determination

They say a strategy is needed to fill the “gaps existing from a national viewpoint” in the Basque Autonomous Community Government’s proposal

Eider Goenaga – DONOSTIA (San Sebastian)

The National Committee of the trade union ELA has called for “a minimum agreement to be reached among the different bodies in favour of the right to self-determination;” and among the three conditions that have to be taken into consideration in the agreement, it has proposed initiating a “parallel strategy” to fill “the gaps existing from a national viewpoint” in the bill approved by the Government of the BAC [Basque Autonomous Community of Araba, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa]. This proposal is included in the declaration published by the ELA National Committee, which has assessed the BAC Government’s proposal for a new political statute.

In ELA’s view one positive point of the proposal for the new political statute is “to specify the principles on which the Basque nation’s right to self-determination is based,” and it also views the mere publishing of a codified text as positive: “because it makes the proposal more specific and leaves fewer opportunities for backing out.” Yet ELA says the agreement between the three political parties EAJ, EA and EB-IU “is not sufficient if a vitally important matter is to be confronted, and if the long-term bases for democratic coexistence and for resolving political conflict are to be established.” Despite acknowledging the “difficulties” for reaching agreement, ELA has called for a broader “minimum agreement” among the parties in favour of self-determination.

ELA believes that the “priority for the coming months” is the securing of this agreement, and has highlighted three aspects “that must be taken into consideration” when agreeing on the minimum points. The trade union is of the opinion that the proposal has to be “a plan for resolving the political conflict” and “all the parties which subscribe to the agreement have to regard it as useful and adequate for developing their own projects.”

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Uribe Says No

Now get this one, a week ago when the guerrilla offered to liberate the Basque backpacker Asier Huegun, the extreme-right president Alvaro Uribe refused it because the guerrilla leaders requested for members of the Autonomous Basque Government to be present at the hand out as a show of solidarity to the Basques and their struggle for self determination, and Uribe, a great friend of Jose Maria Aznar as he is does not recognize the existance of any Basque government.

That tells you how humane these fellas like Uribe and Aznar can be.

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Rabanne In Trintxerpe

Today at Berria:

Paco Rabanne’s universe in Trintxerpe

The presentation has taken place of the cultural centre scheduled to be built in the designer’s home town; the cultural centre, which will house and make the artist’s works known, will have an institute and museum, and its doors will be open to young creators

Ainara Gorostitzu – PASAIA (Gipuzkoa)

Paco Rabanne has received proposals for the building of his museum from all over the world, from Barcelona and Madrid, in particular, but the designer wants to create his universe, his cultural centre in his native town of Trintxerpe [a neighbourhood of Pasaia near San Sebastian]. “If the project goes ahead, it will be for my people, for Trintxerpe,” said the artist yesterday during the visit to see the site where they want to build his centre. Accompanied by the mayoress of Pasaia, Izaskun Gomez, the manager of Oarsoaldea S.A., Fernando Nebreda, and the architect, Julian Argilagos, Paco Rabanne presented “the open project” they want to build on the Herrera quay of Trintxerpe.

The Paco Rabanne Kulturgunea (cultural centre) will be a place that will bear witness to the designer who made it to the most important catwalks using recycled and recyclable material, and it will also house his awards. The architect Argilagos, responsible for the Balentziaga museum of Getaria and who will also design the one in Trintxerpe, said that the new museum would be “a stage for coexistence and cultural interaction.” The quay area of Trintxerpe will consist of four architectonic blocks: one will become the International Institute for Design and Industry based on on-going studies linking Rabanne’s philosophy with ecodesign; another the Paco Rabanne museum, the aim of which is to house the legacy of his works and of those of the designers that come after him; lastly there will be an area of ecohotels and a lecture theatre. In the words of the architect the cultural centre aims “to link culture, art and economy through ecodesign.” To this end continuous research into the new technologies, design and fashion will be needed.

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IBO : Spain Censors Basque Film

As you know by now, the Spanish government led by Aznar has launched a campaign against a documentary by film maker Julio Medem as part of a broader campaign against the freedom of speech of the Basque people, a campaign that also includes direct attacks on Basque cultural organizations.

Here you have a press release by International Basque Organization for Human Rights (IBO) regarding this issue:

Spanish Government Tries To Censor Film In London

El Correo Digital reports that the Spanish Embassy in England asked for the producers of the London Film Festival to withdraw a movie from their line-up. This movie, La Pelota Vasca, La Piel Contra La Piedra (Basque Ball, Skin Against Stone) tells the tale of the current Basque conflict, from all sides of the equation. It’s director, Julio Medem, wanted to give a fair representation of the political and social strife of the Basque region. Spanish officials seem to want nothing to do with such a concept. Spain’s Minister of Culture condemned the film without even seeing it.

The London Film Festival has refused to withdraw the movie. The consequence is that Spain has pulled its traditional subsidy to the festival, which is used to pay the expenses of Spanish participants. La Pelota Vasca is scheduled to play at the London Film Festival October 26 and 27.

For more information:

International Basque Organization For Human Rights
PO Box 225
Corte Madera, CA 94976
www.euskojustice.org

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Proposal to the Parliament

Today at Berria:

Proposal for the new statute now in parliament’s hands

In an extraordinary meeting yesterday the Basque Autonomous Community Government approved the bill for a new political statute. The Lehendakari (President), Juan Jose Ibarretxe, said Basque citizens would be deciding their future “by using their vote”

Edurne Begiristarin – GASTEIZ (Vitoria)

The bill to reform the Statute of Gernika is now in the hands of the Parliament of the BAC (Basque Autonomous Community of Araba, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa). The BAC Government approved the text yesterday in an extraordinary meeting held at Ajuria Enea, the BAC President’s official residence. The President, Juan Jose Ibarretxe, personally took the text of the new political statute of the BAC to the Parliament building and handed it to Juan Mari Atutxa, the Speaker of the Chamber, for it to be registered. The Parliamentary Presiding Committee will most likely classify it on November 4, and it is expected to take the form of a draft law. Following that, the parliamentary groups will have to debate it and the vote on it will be taken next year.

So the first step has been taken by Ibarretxe’s proposed pact for coexistence to replace the Statute of Gernika in force since 1979, and to develop a political pact “for the new generations.” That is how Ibarretxe referred to it yesterday after the meeting held with the BAC Government ministers. Ibarretxe said that the proposal approved by the EAJ, EA and the EB-IU parties was of immense importance and referred to yesterday as “a historic” day.

Ibarretxe appeared together with all the BAC Government ministers in the reception hall of Ajuria Enea and there he read out the official statement. “We, the BAC Government, want to move into a new era by assuming our institutional responsibility and by using the power that is enshrined in Article 46 of the Statute [of Gernika],” he said. He presented the bill as a “modern” proposal to seek solutions and to “live better” and one “which will establish the relationship of Euskadi (the BAC) with Spain, Europe and the world.”

Ibarretxe stressed the fact that the new Statute would not lead to any “split”, because its aim was to achieve a new sphere of coexistence with Spain.

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Madrid Issues Threats

Today atBerria.

So the Spanish regime wants to take "legal" measures after all the illegal measures against the Basques? This should be interesting. I wonder if these tugs in Madrid even know about this thing called the UN Charter, which protects the right of each people to its self determination.

Spanish Government prepared to take legal measures

It regards the proposal which the Autonomous Community Government will be approving today as a “challenge” to all Spanish people

Agencies – MADRID

The Spanish Government says it is prepared to respond to the proposal of the Government of the BAC [Basque Autonomous Community of Araba, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa] “with whatever legal and political initiatives are necessary at each moment.” In an appearance after the cabinet meeting the government spokesman, Eduardo Zaplana, read out the official declaration regarding the plan of Juan Jose Ibarretxe [the Lehendakari or President of the BAC Government] on the excuse that the codified text is scheduled to be approved today.

The declaration, however, not only regards the proposal as a “challenge” to the Spanish Government, but a “challenge” to all the Spanish people. So the Government is “demanding a response from the whole of the society and the solidarity of all Spanish people: of the economic and social bodies, of the intellectuals, of the associations and platforms promoting freedom and of the political parties based on democratic and constitutional values.” Zaplana added: “it [the plan] aims to take away the Spanish people’s status as sole holder of national sovereignty.” The Spanish Government spokesman did not specifically mention changing and beefing up the Criminal Code, but only said they were prepared to take “the necessary legal measures”. However, Jesus Caldera, the spokesman for the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Party) in the Spanish Lower House did bring up the subject and appealed for “calm” after emphasising that they were prepared to debate the matter.

Despite the fact that the day before yesterday Patxi Lopez, the secretary general of the PSE-EE (the Spanish Socialist Party’s wing in the BAC), had said that it would be a “terrible mistake” to change the Criminal Code in order to oppose Ibarretxe’s plan, Caldera’s declarations yesterday indicated quite the opposite. “We will always be prepared to enter into a debate of this kind and to give a response of this nature, but the right moment has to be found,” he pointed out. “This is because calm, prudence and an analysis beforehand are needed to implement such a serious change.”

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About Medem's Documentary

Here you have an article published at The Guardian about Julio Medem's documentary "Basque Ball : The Skin Against the Wall" by Giles Tremlett, a "journalist" in the pay roll of Jose Maria Aznar:

Anyone for pelota?

Julio Medem's new film tells both sides of the bloody history of Spain's Basque country. So why is he being compared to Hitler's film-maker, asks Giles Tremlett

Giles Tremlett
The Guardian,
Thursday October 23 200

When Spanish film director Julio Medem read through his penultimate screenplay, Aitz, he was so shocked by his own writing that he threw it into the wastepaper basket. News that the director of such quirky classics of contemporary Spanish cinema as Cows and Lovers of the Arctic Circle had binned one of his scripts may alarm his devotees. But Medem insists that he jettisoned Aitz not because it was pure bilge, but because it was pure bile.

"I had got to the point where I had even made hatred a noble thing, where I thought it was beautiful to hate. It was obscene, so I threw it away," he says.

Medem's main problem was that he was Basque. Aitz had somehow got caught up in the violence that has tortured and sapped the energies of his countrymen for the past 30 years. Torn apart by the violence of Eta, battered by the opposing forces of Basque and Spanish nationalism, the Basques show no sign of finding a way out of their orgy of hatred and recrimination.

Medem had tried to escape, moving from his home city of San Sebastián to Madrid seven years ago. He had wanted to leave behind the suffocating political atmosphere imposed by those promoting the more exclusive ideals of Basque nationalism. He soon found, however, that there was no respite. For in Madrid the pendulum swung the other way. There he discovered that Basque nationalism of any kind, violent or non-violent, was fast becoming a new demon. In the capital, he says, some were beginning to forget the distinction between the Basques who used bullets to back their argument and those who used words.

And so Medem, who had already cast a sceptical eye on Basque obstinacy and the weight of tradition in his first film, Cows, made the surprising, many would say courageous, decision to turn his film- making skills to politics. The product of that move, a documentary, La Pelota Vasca: la Piel Contra la Piedra (Basque Ball: the Skin Against the Stone), is the most controversial thing to hit Spanish cinemas for years.

The sport of pelota vasca is fast, furious and athletic. Players with large curved baskets strapped to their hands hurl a small, hard ball against two walls set at right-angles. It is also, according to Medem, a form of dialogue between antagonists: the ball a point of union between two sides that are, formally, fighting one another. For the director of The Red Squirrel, Earth, and Sex and Lucia, that also made it a perfect metaphor for what is missing in the Basque country.

Designed to help fill that void and to "see hatred without hating it", Medem's Basque Ball has been condemned by the country's culture minister, Pilar del Castillo, boycotted by some intellectuals and criticised as ingenuous by the others. That is quite something for a film whose apparently modest ambition was to allow some 100 people of all political creeds to talk about 30 years of bloodshed and the growing confrontation between the conservative centralist government of prime minister José María Aznar and the non-violent Basque nationalists who run the Basque regional government.

In fact, the film was pilloried even before it opened, with two anti-Eta campaigners who had agreed to take part insisting they be removed (Medem refused) and Del Castillo declaring that Medem had placed Eta and the Spanish government on equal footing. Medem was compared to Hitler's film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, and one politician called on him to return money state television had paid to show one of his earlier films.

Medem admits that the days before the film's showing at the San Sebastián film festival last month were pure anxiety. "I had not expected to get such a lynching. They were even saying that this film would lead people to terrorism," he says. In the end, his fellow Basques gave Medem a standing ovation, while he and Daniel Múgica, son of a local politician murdered by Eta, fell into an emotional embrace. "It was the biggest and most moving ovation of my life," he says. The film has since played well across the rest of Spain, finding a place in the top 10.

So what does a documentary made by such an idiosyncratic film-maker look like? Some of Medem's favourite visual tricks are here. His interviewees are placed in landscapes, rural and industrial, that sum up the mythical Basque country already seen in Cows - a place of rugged, sometimes brutal, beauty. Snatches of the cowardly axeman hero of Cows, of Basque stone-lifters and the rural sportsmen who are local heroes, are juxtaposed with news footage of violence and death. A naive and romantic Orson Welles appears, describing the Basque people in black and white film (and black and white terms) as neither Spanish nor French. The camera moves through the brooding Basque mountains, a vast depository of myths and of the national identity that many of those filmed seek to create or defend.

Medem, alone, edited more than 100 hours of film down to 115 minutes. His skill with the edit machine helps maintain the dramatic rhythm - as do the tragic first-hand accounts of suffering from those who have experienced the terror. It also leaves a clear, subjective and, for many, controversial message: that only a referendum among Basques could solve the region's problems. Most Spaniards would disagree.

Though Eta refused to be filmed - as did Aznar's People's party - it is difficult to explain the degree to which Medem has crossed the frontier of Spanish political acceptability. The film shows Arnaldo Otegi, leader of the now banned Batasuna party that operated as a front for Eta. For many Spaniards, Otegi is a demon incarnate, a purveyor of violence and cruelty - inexplicably supported by some 10% of Basques. Here, too, is the wife of an Eta man singing the praises of a good father and husband as she visits him in jail.

There is a pain-faced young woman relating a story of torture, beatings, naked humiliation and threats of rape at the hands of the Spanish police. Medem clearly believes her tale; given the desolate way she tells it, it is very hard not to. Viewers have to decide who is lying: the woman or a confident court doctor who denies that torture happens during the five days in which terror suspects can be held by Spanish police. Who is right? It is a question most Spanish newspapers do not air and local cinema critics left out of their reviews.

The intervention of the Eta man's wife has provoked particular rage among the film's critics. The fact that Medem chose to mix her story with that of the wife of an Eta victim has been criticised as giving equal treatment to killers and victims. But this assumes that viewers cannot think for themselves. The Eta wife's protestations that her husband is "the apple of his mother's eye" - and that, therefore, there must be some reason for his violence - serves only to make her, and her husband's cause, sound even more redundant. "This woman cannot bear the idea that her husband is a killer. She is trying to justify the unjustifiable," says Medem.

In a place where hate is such an easy emotion, the wife of the Eta victim, whose main worry is that her son "should not grow up to think he has the right to kill his father's murderers" seems, by contrast, almost angelic.

So, too, does Eduardo Madina, a young, atypical Basque socialist whose reaction to having a leg blown off by an Eta bomb is to remain faithful, despite the provocation, to the beliefs he held before that moment. Invited by his attackers to hate, Madina turned them down. He also did not like Medem's final cut, finding it too pro-Basque nationalist.

Basque Ball has, Medem says, been a form of preparation for his next film, Aitor. "I told myself that first I would do something about politics and then I would feel free to make fiction. I like this story a lot. I have a huge desire to get back to fiction, which is my real place," he says.

The hero of Aitor is, he says, the scion of a great line of pelota players who is forced, during 30 years of Basque violence, to confront a series of tests inviting him to hate. Like Madina, Aitor will refuse the invitation. Helped by the voices of his own secret opera, he will turn instead to love.

For those used to wading through the misery, fear, terror and hatreds of Basque politics, it is a refreshing, if sadly unrealistic, idea. Medem gives his documentary a poetic ending in the mouth of the Basque language's best-known writer, Bernardo Atxaga. The Basque country should be like a city, says Atxaga, embracing all, ending violence and thereby producing a form of communal levitation.

It would be a perfect ending, if only poetry really could stop violence.

· Basque Ball: the Skin Against the Stone is at the London film festival on Sunday and Monday.

Noticed how he starts out by calling Medem a Spaniard? Tremlett has nothing but contempt for the Basque people and their identity.

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Building a New Ikastola

Today at Berria:

Auction to be held to build a new “Ikastola” in Irunberri

Well-known writers, musicians, sportspeople and artists have donated many articles to be sold by telephone and raise funds

Edurne Elizondo – IRUÑEA (Pamplona)

There is no let-up in the wave of solidarity with the Arangoiti Ikastola [Basque-medium school] of Irunberri (Lumbier, Navarre). Celebrities from the fields of science, culture and sport expressed their solidarity yesterday with the organisers of Sunday’s “Nafarroa Oinez” that was washed out by the rain.

A campaign has been launched with the slogan “Euroak euri, eutsi ametsari” (A deluge of Euros, cherish the dream): sportspeople, musicians, writers and other celebrities have donated things connected with their careers to the Ikastola to be auctioned by telephone (on 902 013883). The highest bidder will be able to take the gift home.

More figures than the Arangoiti people expected showed up at the Iruñea Planetarium yesterday for the launch of the new initiative: the physicist Pedro Migel Etxenike, the sculptor Nestor Basterretxea, the stone-lifter Iñaki Perurena, the Osasuna football team players Krutxaga, Puñal and Sanzol, the Basque pelota players Fernando Goñi, Oskar Lasa and Patxi Ruiz, the writer Aingeru Epaltza, the musician Enrike Zelaia, the mountaineer Mari Abrego… “The list is just growing and growing,” said the people in charge of the Ikastola.

October 29 is the deadline for anyone who would like to donate something. On that day and the following day the auction will end and the Arangoiti Ikastola staff will begin to distribute the prizes. The Ikastola chairman, Jose Enrique Garces, announced that on the Friday, October 31, there would be “a children’s festival” in Irunberri.

“We know that we are using the time that belongs to the Ikastola of Lizarra so we want to finish this campaign as soon as possible,” explained Nora Uribeetxeberria, Arangoiti’s head teacher. The Ikastola staff wanted to thank the Lizarra students for the fund-raising they had begun.

Garces explained that the cost of the damage caused by Sunday’s bad weather had not yet been worked out, but added that they would be “announcing it as soon as the figures had been completed.” As an example he said that the damaged stage cost 50,000 euros.

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