MADRID – Basque separatist movement Eta said yesterday it was ready to take steps towards political change in the Spanish region, but stopped short of calling for an end to the armed struggle.
Eta is "prepared to take the necessary steps," toward political change, but "we won't stop until we achieve freedom," it said in a statement released through the newspaper Gara.
The comments come a month after one of the leading members of Eta’s banned political wing Batasuna, Rufino Etxeberria, said the rebels had to stop killing.
Eta “respects those that, in the last few months, are attempting to lay the foundation of a new dynamic for the Euskal Herria,” it said, in a clear reference to Mr Etxeberria’s call for an end to the violence, and added it was willing to work for a consensual agreement.
Euskal Herria, the region Eta is seeking to be made independent from Spain, spans the Pyrenees and includes the Spanish autonomous region of the Basque Country as well as parts of Spain’s Navarra and southern France.
Mr Etxeberria and other members of Batasuna, worried that separatism is losing ground in the Basque Country, want to re-enter legal politics in time for municipal elections in 2011.
Moderate nationalists lost control of the local government last year for the first time in decades.
The separatist rebels have killed more than 850 people since the group was founded over 50 years ago during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.
Eta has been accused of the March 16th killing of French police officer Jean-Serge Nerin in a suburb near Paris. The rebels have seen dozens of their members arrested over the last year in both Spain and France, including a number of its senior military leaders, though they dismissed claims that police operations are hurting the group as “fantasy”.
Spain’s interior minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, “knows very well that the only way to guarantee the end of the Basque resistance is by recognizing the rights of Euskal Herria,” the statement said.
Meanwhile, a Spanish firefighting force yesterday said a video released by French officials investigating the shooting of Jean-Serge Nerin did not show the suspected gunmen, but rather a group of Catalan firefighters on holiday.
Catalonia’s firefighting force told the Associated Press that friends and relatives of six men on holiday in northern France had phoned to say they recognised their loved ones in the published images. – (Reuters, AP)