"Eta affirms that the permanent ceasefire started on March 24 2006 still stands," the group said in a statement sent to the pro-Basque independence newspaper Gara.
"It claims responsibility for the attack at Barajas," it added, not explaining the apparent contradiction.
It's hard to see how the two can go together. Unless it is admitting, perhaps, that there is a rogue element and they have not got them reined in; so they are taking responsibility because they view it as theirs to deal with maverick elements? But no:
In its statement, ETA reiterated a claim that the government had made, and was not keeping, unspecified promises as part of the process that began with the truce.
The group wants to promote the peace process, but reserves the right to "respond" if what it calls government aggression against the pro-independence movement continues, Gara reported.
ETA insisted progress in the peace process must come from a "political agreement" that includes "the minimum democratic rights owed to the Basque Country,'' an apparent allusion to Basques long-standing demands to be able to decide between independence and remaining part of Spain.
In the circumstances it is hard to disagree with
Spain's Interior Minister said the death of two people in the attack was "probably not part of ETA’s plan,” and added the attack was a complete surprise not only to the government but also to Batasuna.
Spain's Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said “there will never again be another credible truce with ETA.". He added the Spanish Government will never again negotiate with the armed Basque group ETA after the attack at Madrid's Barajas airport that left two people dead and about twenty people injured.
In an interview for the US daily The New York Times, the Spanish Interior Minister said "ETA broke their word, they deceived.”
And yet there is this
“Nobody really knows why ETA did it, because we’ve even seen that Batasuna has been completely shaken by it.” “ETA even deceived its own political arm. We knew there was tension with ETA and with Batasuna, but this was a surprise.
So maybe a version of my original idea may be right after all.
Eta admits to fatal December blast | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited:Filed in: Euskadi, ETA, peace, process, reconciliation
4 comments:
Thanks, start by praying for the thousands of Basques murdered by the illegal occupation and colonization of the Basque Country.
And by the way, I did not see you posting anything about praying for the Spanish politicians to start doing something, anything, on behalf of the Peace Process.
Thanks Aleksu. I recall you visiting before when I posted about ETA. I am happy to pray -and do- for recalcitrant Spanish politicos to ease up and allow Euskal Herria to decide for themselves. I hope that the Spanish constitution will be altered to allow for a proper resolution. I don't pray for the dead but I do pray for the living entail of those murders. As I pray for those of non-Euskal descent who through accident of birth now find the only country they know to be Euskadi. Violence and equivocation on the part of those who would claim to represent the aspirations of Euskal-Herria is not going to help. As I said before: learn the lessons of northern Ireland.
Violence and equivocation on the part of those who would claim to represent the aspirations of the Spaniards are not helping either.
It is not the Basques who need to learn from the Irish, it is the Spaniards who need to learn from England.
Spain's violence has killed millions of people in the last five hundred years, entire nations and cultures were wiped out by their greed.
Do you have any idea how many Basques were murdered before that Basque violence you are so obsessed with finally started?
And am talking just last century, actually, from 1936.
Your dismissal of the ethnic composition of a nation is disturbing, that is how the European powers justified their genocide of millions in America, Asia, Africa and Oceania.
Stick to your prayers, and try not to be so harsh on those who rather act.
I agree that perhaps the Spanish do need, in this, to learn form the British/Irish near-resolution of the Northern Irish conflict.
It comes down to this: two wrongs don't make a right, in my book. To murder murderers still leaves one a murderer. To murder relative innocents while trying to harm a bunch of 'murderers' is no better than what you claim to oppose. I can't see how violence against a child who happens to be Spanish but brought up in Donostia, for example atones or makes up for 500 hundred years of oppression or makes the future of that child's Basque friends any more secure. Quite the reverse.
I find it more disturbing that your dismissal of the ethnic minorities of Euskadi seems to be genocidal in likely effect. Are you seriously wishing to make Euskadi the Israel of Europe? And actually you have reversed the polarity of what I have said which does not justify genocide: quite the reverse: the principle of respecting the innocent of whatever their ethnic background is a fundamental issue of human rights.
It's the ETA tactic of violence even when it is clearly against the interest of the Basques peoples that needs scrutiny. And arguably when it against the will of the people as recent demos have perhaps indicated it comes to look psycho- or sociopathic.
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