ARNALDO OTEGI, veteran leader of the banned Basque party Batasuna, has told the Wall Street Journalthat his movement now rejects "any violence that seeks to attain political objectives. We are willing to provide as many guarantees as are necessary to prove that our stance is firm and irreversible."
However, he stopped short of calling on Eta, the terrorist group alleged to be Batasuna’s military wing, to declare its current ceasefire to be “unilateral, permanent and verifiable by the international community”.
The Basque country is awash with speculation that such a declaration, finally ending Eta’s 50-year armed campaign for an independent state, will be made before the end of this year. Batasuna’s chances of relaunching a legal political party to contest elections next May are diminishing with every day that Eta remains silent. The deadline to register such a party is January 28th.
Curiously, well-informed sources had been suggesting that Eta would use the Wall Street Journalas the vehicle for such an announcement, instead of its usual channel, the BBC.
The conservative American daily is an unusual choice for leftist radicals, but they may have chosen this medium to give an added international dimension to their statements, which now tend to be ignored or dismissed in Madrid.
Otegi did a written interview with the paper, which was published yesterday, from a Spanish jail where he faces renewed charges of supporting Eta, despite a recent absolution on the charges.
He made a cryptic reference to "unspecified 'coming developments' [that] will ratchet up the pressure on the government to negotiate an end to the Basque conflict", according to the WSJ. It is hard to imagine what these might be.
Eta’s ceasefire is widely regarded as coming from a position of unprecedented weakness. It had proved incapable of carrying out serious attacks for more than a year before its September announcement that it had “ceased offensive operations”. The Spanish government repeated yesterday that it would engage in no negotiations as the price of peace.
Batasuna is gambling on the prospect of a surge in support if it were legalised after Eta’s exit from the scene. Whether Eta will actually oblige, though, by dissolving itself – it apparently carried out an identity-card raid in France last week – or if the Spanish legal system would facilitate the legalisation of Batasuna in that event, both remain very open questions.