From
Wichita Peace and Freedom Party Examiner
It’s long past time for Spain to put the war with ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) behind it. According to The Wichita Eagle ETA has announced a truce;
“The Basque separatist militant group ETA has issued a video on Sunday, Sept. 5, 2010, declaring a cease fire. The video appeared on Basque newspaper Gara's website and was also made available to the British broadcaster BBC.”
But the government has said that isn’t enough;
“The Basque regional government says a cease-fire announcement by the separatist group ETA is "absolutely insufficient" because the group has not renounced violence or announced its dissolution.
Basque Interior Minister Rodolfo Ares' comments were the first official ones from the Basque region or Madrid to ETA's announcement earlier Sunday that it will no longer commit attacks, although the group did not specify if it would surrender its weapons or how long the truce might last.
Ares said the ETA pledge "does not take into account what the vast majority of Basque society demands and requires from ETA, which is that it definitively abandon terrorist activity."
For a long time alleged supporters of the ETA, writers, journalist and other activists have been jailed as terrorists. This is the main issue that has kept ETA from ending its war as the Irish Republican Army did in Ireland.
The government has been good at catching and thwarting ETA attacks, but ETA is good at rebuilding small cells capable of striking at targets in Spain.
Maybe it is just Spain’s pompous attitude, with a government that thinks that they are too good to have to speak with members of ETA. After 9/11 they banned a political party, Batasuna, that was sympathetic to ETA. It is undemocratic for a government to ban political parties. The Spanish government has been relentless in its campaign against ETA and all its supporters, what ever form they pursue.
It’s time for both sides to sit down and put an end to this.
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