THE STRUGGLING Basque peace process received a badly needed impetus at the weekend. Veteran radical nationalist Arnaldo Otegi, spokesman for the banned Batasuna party, spelled out from jail his movement’s “irreversible” commitment to using exclusively peaceful means in its pursuit of independence from Spain (and, ultimately, from France).
He did this in unambiguous language and in conciliatory tones. He did not demand any direct quid pro quo, not even prisoner releases, from the Spanish government. Moreover, he said that if he had the leadership of the terrorist group ETA seated in front of him, he would ask them to make their six-week-old ceasefire “unilateral, permanent, and internationally verifiable”. He added that, should ETA carry out further attacks, the group would be acting against the strategy of the pro-independence movement, which would “oppose” such actions. He also ruled out any continuance of ETA’s main funding mechanism – extortion – and of the tactic of “street struggle” by the Basque radical youth movement.
Otegi’s declarations were made to John Carlin, a journalist with a distinguished record in covering the South African peace process, and appeared in the Madrid-based newspaper El Pais on Sunday. This is remarkable as the paper has close links to the governing Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and until now has shared the government’s scepticism about the ceasefire.
As we know well from experience in the North, scenarios, gestures, semantics, and even punctuation can be critical in advancing a peace process. It is true that Otegi has made statements along similar lines in the past, as did one of his few senior colleagues still at liberty, Rufi Etxeberria, in an interview with The Irish Times last month. But the extraordinary detail of the Otegi interview appears to copperfasten Batasuna’s commitment to an unarmed strategy.
If ETA is not happy about this development – and there are indications that many of its (greatly reduced) membership are very uneasy about it – then Otegi is saying that the group is now on its own. The sea of popular support that Batasuna once represented for “armed struggle” has been drained.
In view of this, one has to wonder at the Spanish government’s continued refusal to acknowledge that the Basque scenario really has changed. Instead, it has maintained an intense police offensive against Basque radicals since ETA’s ceasefire announcement. Batasuna remains illegal, demonstrations have been banned, dozens of suspects have been arrested and there are disturbing allegations of torture.
True, the PSOE government was badly burned by the breakdown of its own courageous Basque peace initiative in 2006, wrecked by the irresponsible intransigence of two extremes – ETA’s and that of the main Spanish opposition party, the deeply conservative Partido Popular. But this is a moment for statesmanship, a long overdue opportunity to convince those Basques who want independence that there really is a home for them in democratic Spain.