ANALYSIS:A missing word and a leaked document strengthen doubts about whether Eta has really accepted that its war is over, writes PADDY WOODWORTH
A DEGREE of mutual trust, and agreement on the meaning of words, are crucial in peace processes. Both are still lacking as the Basque terrorist group Eta enters what some believe, and many hope, is the last stage of its 50-year “war” with Spain.
Despite the Spanish government’s immediate dismissal of Eta’s latest statement on its ceasefire, not a day has passed since last Monday without senior ministers commenting on last week’s declaration by the Basque terrorist group that its current truce is “permanent, general, and internationally verifiable”.
The prize of going down in history as the government that brought about the end of Eta must be tempting, especially for an administration mired in economic meltdown and collapsing in opinion polls. But bitter experience has cautioned prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his colleagues against any premature celebration.
The government knows that Eta has been crippled by effective police work in recent years. Madrid is also inclined to believe that the group’s erstwhile political wing, the banned Batasuna party, has recognised the futility of violence and is, for the first time, attempting to pressurise Eta to unconditionally dissolve itself.
But it remains suspicious that Eta’s truce is a strategic gambit to persuade the government and courts to legalise Batasuna, before renewing military operations once the party returns to Basque institutions after next May’s elections.
A document leaked to the Spanish newspaper El Paísat the weekend appears to confirm that Eta is still locked into the dogma that "armed struggle" will remain an essential element in the pursuit of Basque independence.
According to the paper, a resolution passed by the group, following an internal debate after its initial ceasefire declaration last September, has restated its core value that “a political-military strategy is not open to question”. This statement flies in the face of unequivocal commitments to an exclusively unarmed strategy by Batasuna leaders.
One cannot rule out the possibility that the document has been forged as a black propaganda weapon by elements hostile to any settlement. But the report was written by a Basque journalist of great experience and integrity, José Luis Barbería.
Furthermore, if this is Eta’s position, it would explain the absence of a key word from last week’s declaration. That word is “unilateral”, and it is taken, both by the Spanish government and by Batasuna, to mean that Eta would be abandoning violence without any preconditions whatsoever. Its omission, three months after Batasuna had explicitly called on Eta to include it, can hardly be accidental.
Last week Batasuna struggled hard to read the word into the document, insisting that it was a “historic step forward” and the “end of the end of Eta”. But the word is simply not there.
The scenario for the months up to and after the May elections is likely to resemble a poker game. Batasuna will apply for legalisation, with statutes that explicitly reject violence. Madrid will almost certainly reject the application, on the grounds that Batasuna has not broken with Eta, and Eta has not dissolved itself.
This would put Batasuna in a very tight spot. Most of its supporters want an end to violence, and the party desperately needs to re-enter the political arena. But long historical and personal loyalties make the prospect of a complete break with Eta very hard to swallow.
Meanwhile, Eta hardliners may be calculating, as Barbería’s article suggests, that the continued exclusion of Batasuna from elections will radicalise many Batasuna supporters once more, persuading them to give at least passive support to a renewed terrorist campaign.
The government holds one option that could make this bleak outcome much less likely. It could reverse its policy of “dispersing” Eta prisoners to jails hundreds of kilometres from their families, and return them to the Basque Country, without having to change any law.
Pragmatically, this move would widen the already deep division between the current Eta leadership and most of the prisoners, and give Batasuna supporters something to feel good about. And it would also respond to the long-standing criticism of human rights groups that the dispersal policy is a gratuitous and illegitimate punishment for the prisoners and, especially, for their families.