MADRID – The Basque separatist group ETA, which has received severe blows in recent years, appears to be on the verge of abandoning the use of violence and instead seeking Basque independence and unification through peaceful means.
Late last month, ETA announced that it was open to negotiations with the new Spanish government, led by Socialist Prime Minister Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, but stressed that it would not accept any conditions placed on the talks, such as laying down its arms.
Meanwhile, sources close to the group’s banned political wing, Batasuna, have revealed that on Nov. 14, the party will release a communiqué with proposals for the future of Spain‘s northern Basque region, which will include its support for negotiations between ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, which means Basque Homeland and Freedom in the Basque language) and the government.
The separatist group, already weakened by massive arrests of its members and leaders over recent years, was dealt a further blow this week when a letter sent to the current leadership by six former leaders, who are serving lengthy prison sentences, was leaked to the press. In the letter, the veteran leaders called on the group to abandon the use of violence.
One of the signatories of the letter is Francisco Mugica Garmendia, alias Pakito, who was the “maximum leader” of ETA from 1989 until 1992, when he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to 4,645 years in prison, as the mastermind behind 23 murders.
The letter was also signed by Carlos Almorza, formerly in charge of the group’s financial affairs, and Ignacio Arakama, alias Makario, who represented ETA in the 1992 negotiations with the Spanish government, headed at the time by Socialist Prime Minister Felipe González. The talks, held in Algeria, failed to result in an agreement.
“The armed struggle we are carrying out today is not working,” the six former leaders said in their letter, published Tuesday by the Diario de Noticias, a newspaper in Navarra, in northern Spain. “We are dying a slow death. It is impossible to carry out armed struggle when we are so vulnerable to repression.”
This apparent change of heart on the part of both the ETA prisoners and the Batasuna party has yet to have any obvious impact on Spain’s two largest political parties, the ruling Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) and the conservative Popular Party (PP), the main opposition force.
Both parties insist that the group must lay down its arms immediately, as was stated on Wednesday by PSOE parliamentary spokesman Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, at the end of a meeting of the so-called anti-terrorist pact.
The meeting was attended by representatives of the PSOE, the PP, the Association of Victims of Terrorism, and the Association of Victims of Mar. 11 (the date of the terrorist attacks on commuter trains in Madrid, which were initially – and falsely – blamed on ETA).
Spanish Justice Minister Juan Fernando López Aguilar, who chaired the meeting, said that all of the members of the pact shared “determination, will, and clear objectives in the fight against terrorism in all of its manifestations.”
For her part, the spokeswoman for the Basque country regional government, Miren Azcarate of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), viewed the letter from the ETA prisoners in a positive light, saying “it shows that within ETA as well, an end to violence is becoming a strongly supported position.”
At the same time, she added, it confirms that the time has come to seriously pursue a political tack.
Meanwhile, Iñaki Anasagasti, the PNV spokesman in the Spanish senate, said that “if Batasuna were to say, once and for all, what these people in jail have said, the matter [of violence] would be resolved.”
An important detail to take into account is the fact that the letter from the six prisoners, while published in Spain on Tuesday, was actually written in August, before the arrest of the entire ETA leadership in France, which was accompanied by the seizure of hundreds of kilos of explosives, weapons, money, computers, and documents.
The information gathered led to further searches and arrests, some as recent as this week.
According to Arnaldo Otegui, an ETA veteran who served a prison sentence and after release was elected to the Basque country parliament in representation of Batasuna, ETA “is saying a lot of things, looking for new formulas, expressing the desire for peace, and appears prepared to listen to the calls [to abandon violence].”
The leftist Basque independence movement has also begun to advocate an end to armed struggle. Lawmaker Patxi Zabaleta, who belonged to ETA during the Francisco Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) and now heads Aralar, a left-wing party that supports Basque independence, said that if ETA truly wants to explore new options, “it should take the courageous step of calling a truce.”
For Zabaleta, “this would be the starting point for a process of dialogue, along with the acceptance of all political strategies, all ideas and all people.”
ETA’s weakness and growing political isolation could compel its leadership to take this step, given that it is “totally vulnerable to repression and has no capacity to react,” according to the imprisoned ETA veterans who authored the letter.
ETA was founded in 1959. With the death of Franco and the beginning of the re-democratization of Spain, some of its members renounced the use of violence. One of these was Mario Onaindía, who died two years ago.
Although once sentenced to death, he was pardoned and released from prison in 1976, and eventually came to occupy a seat in the Senate for the PSOE – now the ruling party – as well as serving as the party’s president in the Basque province of Alava.
