| ||
| ||
| ||
| ||
 |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Basque separatist: No cease-fire
From CNN Madrid Bureau Chief Al Goodman
MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- Three hooded representatives of the outlawed Basque separatist group ETA dashed hopes for another cease-fire when they appeared in a secretive televised address to deny that any truce was afoot and to warn that all "fronts" remain open. The videotape was played late Thursday on the publicly run television of the Basque regional government. One ETA representative said on camera: "It must be said on ETA's part, there is no tactical cease-fire." ETA, which is blamed for more than 810 deaths in its long fight for Basque independence, is listed as a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union, of which Spain is a member. The videotape of the ETA representatives, wearing white face masks and black berets, was released just ahead of the May 25 local elections in Spain, which will be the first time in 24 years that politicians linked to ETA will be barred by court order from running. The court order means that the leftist, pro-independence politicians who currently hold dozens of mayoral posts and town council seats cannot be re-elected. On the videotape, ETA urged the more than 100,000 Basques who in the past have typically voted for these now-banned politicians to defy the courts and vote again for them, even though their ballots this time will be deemed void. But the Basque regional government president, Juan Jose Ibarretxe, Friday said it would be far more useful for those votes, rather than being wasted on banned politicians, to go instead to his legal, moderate Basque Nationalist Party. "What Madrid fears is those votes going to the Basque Nationalist Party," said Ibarretxe, whose regional government's TV station is the one that aired the secretive ETA videotape. The Basque Nationalist Party favors Basque independence but says it opposes ETA's violence. Ibarretxe currently has a plan for Basque self-determination, which ETA on the videotape blasted as "partial, exclusive and not a resolution to the conflict." Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, who survived an ETA assassination attempt in 1995 and has taken a hard-line stance against terrorism, indicated earlier this week that the moderate Basques appeared to be planning some alliance with ETA, a charge the moderate Basques heatedly denied. ETA's last self-declared cease-fire lasted 14 months, from late 1998 to early 2000, a period that brought some optimism of a permanent solution to the long-running Basque separatist violence. But since ETA called it off -- with the government and ETA blaming each other for failing to negotiate a peace deal -- ETA commandos have been blamed for 43 deaths. ETA statements to Basque media, days or weeks after the various attacks, have claimed responsibility for most of those killings. The court-ordered ban on politicians considered close to ETA grew out of a law last year that led to the outlawing of Batasuna, a leftist, pro-Basque independence formation that authorities said had directly helped ETA with financing and logistics. Many of the Batasuna politicians regrouped for the May 25 elections under a different electoral banner, AuB. But Spain's highest tribunal, the Constitutional Court, recently upheld a ban on the AuB candidate lists, saying they were just an extension of the outlawed Batasuna party.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
