Gorka Landaburu, victim of ETA, he has said these days of commemorations for the surrender of the terrorist gang ten years ago that of the streets of the Basque Country “The looks of hatred have disappeared & rdquor ;. Living without hatred, without deaths, without fear, without resentment is the proper thing to do a mature democratic society at peace with itself. Today to the generations that did not live the long stage of terror It may seem like a no-brainer to you, but for 50 years it wasn’t. The reasons for such an exceptionality should not evaporate into oblivion, however attractive such a predisposition may seem.
The Lendakari Urkullu considers it essential to create an inclusive memory from what has occured. It is in line with what was repeated by the great protagonist of the moment, the former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero: “we are a democracy without terrorism, but with memory & rdquor ;. Or we should be. To reach this inclusive memory a laconic “never should have happened & rdquor;” is not enough. although the phrase of Arnaldo Otegui has its value being pronounced by whoever pronounced it. Perhaps it will take a few more decades to establish the causes of the monstrous error of embrace violence to achieve a political goal, as well as to unravel the reasons and the confusion of the network of complicities and silences that could have encouraged such an error or, at the very least, delay the end of the tragedy.
The questions are much more numerous than the certainties in this entire story, including the outcome of the surrender and when it materialized. How is it possible that for 30 years no one was able to make ETA understand that terrorist violence would not subdue a democratic and legal state? It is true that said State fell into its own errors seeking illegal shortcuts to end the nightmare, but the system itself punished those responsible and redirected the situation. In the end, the state that it was intended to defeat emerged strengthened from the challenge.
Zapatero has declared these days that the negotiations did not contemplate “political counterparts, only the delivery of weapons and the future of the prisoners”. The approach of the socialist government allows us to think that ETA was already very weakened when it sat down to talk, Either because of the police persecution, because of the difficulties of continuing to extort money to finance themselves, because of international cooperation or because of the distancing of the pro-independence left and the political and emotional rupture on the part of Basque society with radical postulates, including nationalists scared by the institutional consequences of the failure of the Ibarretxe plan.
Then, When did it really start the end of ETA? Or rather, when did the terrorists realize the inevitability of their defeat, a very different ending than the one that kept them shooting and planting bombs for 50 years? It is a mystery to be clarified. In any case, it was the result of a process whose triggers can only be guessed. It seems dark even to consider that ETA persisted in causing pain, being aware that its only objective was to alleviate the fate of its prisoners.
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Of the many theories formulated prior to the terrorist organization’s abandonment of arms about what its end would be like, none came close to what happened in the last decade. Neither did it become a simple survival mafia of the most intransigent, nor did its leading role in the national construction of the Basque Country prosper, as was feared for some time by the Estella Pact. ETA ended without further in-depth reflection from the political class, just a few worthy novels, films and documentaries that help to consolidate a normalcy with a tendency to forgetfulness. It has not even been possible for the Congress of Deputies to celebrate the first decade of peace in Euskadi in half a century as it deserves. The instrumentalization of the past for the benefit of the politics of the present is too strong a temptation for some and this is the greatest danger that must overcome the purpose of creating inclusive memory, the first step to elaborate the pertinent ones. lessons for the future, warnings for apprentice sorcerers.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com