Raphael Herrero |
San Sebastián (EFE).- “Today, May 3 at 2:00 p.m. local time, ETA has ceased to exist.” With this precision, five years ago today, the executive director of the Henri Dunant Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, David Harland, certified the definitive dissolution of the terrorist organization.
He did so after two historical leaders of the band, Josu Urrutikoetxea, “Josu Ternera”, then on the run from justice, and María Soledad Iparragirre “Anboto”, imprisoned in France, read the latest ETA statement, in which he spoke without coverts of “dissolution” and the end of a “historical cycle and its function.”
Five years later, ETA’s prisoners remain, the pain of its victims and the ballast of its memory, very present as a throwing weapon in the muddy political debate, above all, curiously, outside the Basque Country. In the Basque Country, despite the good intentions of some sectors and institutions, the wounds of so many years of violence do not make it possible to build a shared and peaceful memory.
An already minor issue for Basque society, which in these five years has seen a global pandemic and its consequent umpteenth economic crisis, from which it is already coming out strong.
In this five-year period, however, there have been some milestones on the path to rebuilding coexistence, the most significant of which was this year: the definitive end to the prisoner dispersal policy, which for decades was one of the main catalysts for social mobilization in the ETA environment.
Prisoners in jails
There are currently 127 prisoners in Basque prisons, 7 in Pamplona and 12 in France, in addition to about twenty who are serving their sentences at home and in specialized centers.
To these must be added a little more than a dozen critical inmates who left the prisoner collective (EPPK) dissatisfied with their acceptance of legal channels and who have the support of dissident minority groups who are demanding total amnesty. A massive release that in the Basque Country, unlike other more or less similar processes such as the one in Ireland, has not occurred.
Another important novelty, facilitated by the détente derived from the silence of the arms, lies in the fact that the Basque Government took over a year and a half ago with the transfer of prisons, provided for in the Statute, but unthinkable in the previous situation.
The Basque executive is now responsible for granting third degrees to the inmates, also to those of ETA, although it is running into the opposite position of the National Court, which has revoked 11 degree progressions on the grounds that the prisoners have not expressed true regret.
These steps in prison policy have been favored by the political relationship between EH Bildu and the Spanish Government and also by pragmatic positions such as the one that has led ETA prisoners to accept the legal paths to their release, in addition to gestures such as the resignation of the “ongi etorri”, public acts of welcome that inflicted suffering on the victims.
In addition, in October 2021 the Abertzale left staged a new “step” by solemnly expressing its “regret and pain for the suffering suffered” by the victims of ETA, a pain that, added the Abertzale leader, Arnaldo Otegi, “should never have produced”.
The left-wing parties -PSOE and Podemos- saw positive aspects in this declaration, while the PP rejected it outright and the PNV emphasized that the unfairness of the pain caused was not mentioned.
In these five years, EH Bildu has consolidated its commitment to politics, to the point of becoming one of the most stable partners of the Socialist Government and of focusing its debates on issues that have been ruined by decades of rhetoric of the independence struggle.
This assumption of “real politics” has not been unanimously shared by the bases of the nationalist left, especially by the youngest, many of whom have organized around an orthodox socialist movement GKS (Gazte Koordinadora Sozialista) that rejects the “bourgeoisification” of EH Bildu and raises a series of demands shared by similar movements of an internationalist nature, in which issues such as prisoners or independence are relegated.
The welcome political stability without violence and the bad experience of the Catalan process have also cooled the ideal of independence in Euskadi.
The latest Basque Sociometer, prepared by the Basque Government, pointed out in March of this year that 23% of the citizens of the Basque Autonomous Community are in favor of independence, another 23% would support it “depending on the circumstances” and 41% He openly disagrees.
Open wounds
Without the tension generated by the violence, ETA’s shadow continues to be long, with open wounds and the realization, increasingly assumed, that there can be no shared account of what happened in the sixty-year history of the terrorist organization.
The last sample, this same year, has been the controversy surrounding the local memory pages prepared by the Aranzadi Science Society, which included victims of ETA and terrorists sentenced to hundreds of years for various murders, as well as a historical review. in accordance with the story of a conflict between two sides that the nationalist left has always defended.
On the other hand, the recent promotion of the Lieutenant General of the Civil Guard Arturo Espejo, presumably implicated in the death of Mikel Zabalza, has also reopened wounds in broad sectors of Basque society, including the Basque Socialists themselves.
Although for groups of victims and for certain political sectors ETA remains alive as long as EH Bildu participates in the institutions, no one in the Basque Country anymore looks at the underside of their car or needs an escort, five years after the terrorist organization dissolved without having achieved any of his objectives.