ETA must disband, or no deal

The abertzale (radical Basque separatist) left is continuing its attempts to purchase political credibility at the lowest possible cost. On Sunday it presented a manifesto “for a scenario of just and lasting peace” — which, as a relative novelty, contains an explicit “recognition of the suffering caused” to those whom it terms “victims of the conflict.”

A novelty, in that they seem to have understood that they can no longer ignore the victims of ETA in the phrasing of their own proposal for the end of ETA, which is centered on the question of the organization’s prisoners. But only a relative one, the abertzale leader Arnaldo Otegi having years ago admitted, more clearly than this text does, that one of the greatest errors committed by his group had been to “imply that we didn’t care about the suffering of others.” Even this grudging recognition is still couched in the terms of a “conflict” with victims on both sides.

So far, most of the ETA victims’ associations reject any flexibilization of penitentiary policy (lenient treatment of prisoners, chiefly regarding moving them to prisons closer to the Basque Country), which others consider essential for a final cessation of ETA violence. The victims’ argument is that it is not enough for ETA and its political wing to shift their rhetoric, in order to obtain penal and moral impunity. This is a strong argument, which, however, must be considered in the light of terrorism situations elsewhere, in which policies of lenient penal treatment were decisive in consolidating an irreversible end to violence. The government is sensitive to the victims’ viewpoint, though it admits that it must act with sagacity “among other reasons, to avoid a split in ETA,” as the interior minister stated on Sunday in this newspaper. The minister also said that there will be no lenient treatment of prisoners until ETA is formally dissolved. This may be too emphatic a commitment, but, being a purely administrative matter, it is not conditioned by law and is easily reversible, allowing such a measure to be utilized intelligently.

However, ETA’s refusal to disband reinforces the distrust of those who deny that its withdrawal is really irreversible. Obviously, if the organization were to take this step, it would facilitate a more flexible application of penitentiary legislation, and would certainly reduce the victims’ reluctance to accept such a policy. If it still declines to do so, it is because it wishes to keep up a tug-of-war with democratic political parties and institutions, and to show that it does not yield to pressure.

In turn, by declining to demand the dissolution of ETA, the abertzale left fosters the suspicion, not so much that it desires the return of ETA, which would be detrimental to it, but that it sees nothing wrong in maintaining its ghostly presence as a latent threat. Sunday’s text, padded with more rhetoric than usual, falls far short of the mark, wasting yet another opportunity to speed up a positive outcome by doing what they will have to do sooner or later.