Basque Separatists Declare Halt to Violence

[The_Dude 1,142]

Basque Separatists Declare Halt to Violence

LONDON — After nearly half a century of violence in its struggle for independence in the traditional Basque homeland in Spain and France, the separatist group ETA declared a unilateral end to its campaign of bombings and shootings on Thursday, saying it wished to seize a “historical opportunity to reach a just and democratic resolution” of the conflict.

The group’s announcement of “the definite cessation of its military activity” came in the form of a written statement and an accompanying video that was made available to The New York Times and the BBC in London under an embargo stipulating that the statement not to be made public until 6 p.m. British time, 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time in the United States. ETA’s officials said they planned to release the statement simultaneously to two sympathetic Basque-language newspapers , Garra and Berria, published in San Sebastian, the political center of the main Basque homeland in Spain.

The video showed the statement being read in Spanish by one of a group of masked and hooded men, and intermediaries with access to ETA identified the men as members of the group’s General Command.

The announcement was carefully choreographed to follow an appeal to ETA issued by a group of informal peace negotiators who met in San Sebastian on Monday. Those negotiators, who included Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations, and Gerry Adams, the leader of the Irish nationalist group Sinn Fein, said in their statement that “it is time to end, and possible to end, the last armed confrontation in Europe.”

Although the announcement met longstanding demands from the Spanish and French governments, the United Nations and human rights groups for an end to the violence that has characterized the militants’ struggle, it appeared to fall short of guaranteeing that the armed struggle would never resume. For one thing, the ETA statement, far from renouncing the group’s goal of independence, reasserted it emphatically, with the commanders joining at the video’s end with traditional ETA rallying cries reaffirming their demands for freedom.

“The fight for independence for the Basque homeland goes on!” they cried.

Analysts who have followed ETA’s course in recent years said another cause for wariness about the group’s intentions lay in the fact that it has made previous cease-fire declarations that have been quickly abandoned, most egregiously in 2006, when a truce declared after negotiations with the government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez failed and ETA militants mounted a deadly car bomb attack at Madrid’s main international airport. Last January, ETA declared a “permanent cease-fire,” which some analysts said on Thursday was broadly similar, if less comprehensive, than the declaration of the end to armed struggle in its new declaration.

Against this, some Spanish commentators said the declaration amounted to a recognition by ETA’s commanders that the group had effectively been routed by a harsh crackdown mounted in recent years by the Spanish and French governments, with a leading role played by Nicolas Sarkozy as France’s interior minister until 2006, and as the French president since then. With hundreds of its activists rounded up and imprisoned, some estimates have said that ETA, in recent times, has had only 50 active militants capable of mounting an attack.

Skepticism about the announcement also centered on the fact that Spain’s Socialist government and the main center-right Popular Party, which is a strong favorite to win a general election on Nov. 20, appeared to have played no part in the behind-the-scenes preparations for the ETA announcement.

Indeed, the Popular Party, which appears headed for an absolute parliamentary majority in the election, has strongly opposed any quick peace deal, insisting that ETA not only renounce its violence and disarm, but dissolve on terms to be negotiated with the authorities in Madrid.

In addition, the ETA statement, contrary to demands that have been made by the Madrid government, offered no apology to the victims of its past actions. According to tallies kept by Spanish human rights groups and others, these include at least 800 people who have been killed, many of them in bombings and shootings that have occurred outside the main Basque population centers in southwest France and northeastern Spain. On the contrary, the ETA statement emphasized the “violence and oppression” it said had been inflicted on its followers and on the Basque population.

“In response to violence and oppression, dialogue and agreement ought to characterize the new era,” the ETA statement said, according to an unofficial translation of the statement’s original Spanish version. “The recognition of the Basque homeland and respect for the popular will should prevail over the attempt to impose. This is the desire of Basque citizens.”

In the statement’s key passage, it added: “ETA has decided the definitive cessation of its military activity. ETA calls on the governments of Spain and France to open a process of direct dialogue whose objective is the resolution of the consequences of the conflict and thus the end of the armed confrontation.

“Finally, ETA calls on Basque society to involve itself in the process of solutions to construct a situation of peace and liberty,” the statement said.

The ETA commanders appeared to have based their declaration on a formulation suggested by the peace negotiators. In the key passage, the commanders used almost identical wording to that used by the negotiators when they urged ETA in their statement to make “a public declaration of the definitive cessation of all armed action.”

Source

[scandal 951]

In addition, the ETA statement, contrary to demands that have been made by the Madrid government, offered no apology to the victims of its past actions. According to tallies kept by Spanish human rights groups and others, these include at least 800 people who have been killed, many of them in bombings and shootings that have occurred outside the main Basque population centers in southwest France and northeastern Spain. On the contrary, the ETA statement emphasized the “violence and oppression” it said had been inflicted on its followers and on the Basque population.

Wow what a sense of deja vu I had reading those words above. Where have I seen such a justification of terrorism recently? Oh, I remember!

Look dude - I’m not a proponent of suicide bombing. But I don’t see why targeting military personnel in this way is essentially any more reprehensible than dropping missiles on them from the air or shooting at them from tanks, despite knowing the “collateral damage” in civilian casualties that will result. And I really don’t see how suicide bombings are any more outrageous than the 6 decades of terror and ethnic cleansing that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians. What did you expect - that they would use their F-16s and Apache helicopters and bunker busters that they get courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer ? You work with what you have.

[The_Dude 1,142]

Wow what a sense of deja vu I had reading those words above. Where have I seen such a justification of terrorism recently? Oh, I remember!

Don't expect WOM to actually be a critic of her own partisan beliefs. WOM and Sofiyya are interested in vengeance, not a homeland.

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

Wow what a sense of deja vu I had reading those words above. Where have I seen such a justification of terrorism recently? Oh, I remember!

Look dude - I’m not a proponent of suicide bombing. But I don’t see why targeting military personnel in this way is essentially any more reprehensible than dropping missiles on them from the air or shooting at them from tanks, despite knowing the “collateral damage” in civilian casualties that will result. And I really don’t see how suicide bombings are any more outrageous than the 6 decades of terror and ethnic cleansing that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians. What did you expect - that they would use their F-16s and Apache helicopters and bunker busters that they get courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer ? You work with what you have.

You won't debate it in the thread where the discussion was going on, but you drag a snippet over here in order to take a pot shot ? Lameness.

Anyway, what part of targeting military personnel did you not understand ? Because according to the U.S. State Department:

"...the term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents"

Larry Derfner said it quite clearly (only to have the Jerusalem Post freak out and fire him):

I think a lot of people who realize that the occupation is wrong also realize that the Palestinians have the right to resist it – to use violence against Israelis, even to kill Israelis, especially when Israel is showing zero willingness to end the occupation, which has been the case since the Netanyahu government took over (among other times in the past).

But people don’t want to say this, especially right after a terror attack like this last one that killed eight Israelis near Eilat. And there are lots of good reasons for this reticence, such as: You don’t want to further upset your own countrymen when they are grieving, you don’t want to say or write anything that could be picked up by Israel’s enemies and used as justification for killing more of us. (These are good reasons; fear of being called a traitor, for instance, is a bad reason.)

But I think it’s time to overcome this reticence, even at the cost of enflaming the already enflamed sensitivities of the Israeli public, because this unwillingness to say outright that Palestinians have the right to fight the occupation, especially now, inadvertently helps keep the occupation going.

When we say that the occupation is a terrible injustice to the Palestinians, but then say that Palestinian terror/resistance is a terrible injustice to Israel, we’re saying something that’s patently illogical to anyone but a pacifist, and there aren’t many pacifists left, certainly not in Israel. The logical, non-pacifist mind concludes that both of those statements can’t be true – that if A is hurting B and won’t stop, then B damn sure has the right to hurt A to try to make him stop. But if everybody, not only the Right but the Left, too, is saying that B, the Palestinians, don’t have the right to hurt A, the Israelis, then the logical mind concludes that Israel must not be hurting the Palestinians after all, the occupation must not be so bad, the occupation must not be hurting the Palestinians at all – because if it was, they would have the right to hurt us back, and everybody agrees that they don’t. So when they shoot at us or fire rockets at us, it’s completely unprovoked, which gives us the right, the duty, to bash them and bash them until they stop – and anybody who tries to deny us that right doesn’t have a leg to stand on, so we’re just going to keep right on bashing them. And when the Palestinians complain about the occupation, we Israelis can honestly say we don’t know what they’re talking about.

This, I’m convinced, is how the Left’s ritual condemnations of terror are translated in the Israeli public’s mind – as justification for the occupation and an iron-fist military policy.

But if, on the other hand, we were to say very forthrightly what many of us believe and the rest of us suspect – that the Palestinians, like every nation living under hostile rule, have the right to fight back, that their terrorism, especially in the face of a rejectionist Israeli government, is justified – what effect would that have? A powerful one, I think, because the truth is powerful. If those who oppose the occupation acknowledged publicly that it justifies Palestinian terrorism, then those who support the occupation would have to explain why it doesn’t. And that’s not easy for a nation that sanctifies the right to self-defense; a nation that elected Irgun leader Menachem Begin and Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir as prime minister.

...

And so long as we who oppose the occupation keep pretending that the Palestinians don’t have the right to resist it, we tacitly encourage Israelis to go on blindly killing and dying in defense of an unholy cause.

And by tacitly encouraging Israelis in their blindness, I think we endanger their lives and ours, their country and ours, much more than if we told the truth and got quoted on Hamas websites.

There’s no time for equivocation anymore, if there ever was. The mental and moral paralysis in this country must be broken. Whoever the Palestinians were who killed the eight Israelis near Eilat last week, however vile their ideology was, they were justified to attack. They had the same right to fight for their freedom as any other unfree nation in history ever had. And just like every harsh, unjust government in history bears the blame for the deaths of its own people at the hands of rebels, so Israel, which rules the Palestinians harshly and unjustly, is to blame for those eight Israeli deaths – as well as for every other Israeli death that occurred when this country was offering the Palestinians no other way to freedom.

Or as even Tzipi Livni (daughter of two Irgun terrorists) has pointed out:

"Somebody who is fighting against Israeli soldiers is an enemy and we will fight back, but I believe that this is not under the definition of terrorism, if the target is a soldier."