Repression and Torture of Basque activists

international | rights, freedoms and repression | news report Saturday February 28, 2009 19:21 by Cormac Mac Gall

Repression of Basque pro-lndependence Left movement by Spanish and French states increases. Spanish state's regular use of torture also exposed.

International organisations condemn Spanish use of torture and repression while the Basque movement steps up resistance and calls for international solidarity with its struggle.

Democracy 3 Million founders at press conference in January

In recent weeks the Spanish state has banned yet another two Basque political parties accusing them of links to ETA but without producing any evidence to back their charge. The two parties are Askatasuna (meaning freedom) and Democracy 3 Million and the state also arrested eight of their leaders. This means that Basque independence opinion will not be represented by any party in the forthcoming elections in March, disenfranchising an estimated 20% of the population.

In response, the Basque pro-Independence Left has produced its own ballot papers and distributed them in variety of ways, including through the Internet, calling on its supporters to use these “golden votes” on March 1st. Those ballots cannot legally elect any representatives but will be counted (as 'spoiled votes'). A petition protesting the banning is also circulating on the Internet. The Spanish state has called for the web provider of these initiatives to close down the pages but has not so far been successful.

However the Spanish state has arrested eight of the fifteen public figures from the arenas of trade unionS, arts, sport, Basque language and social work who founded Democracy 3 Million. The Spanish high court closed down the offices of the two organisations and their websites too. A demonstration in Bilbao against the arrests and the banning of the political parties was also itself been banned; demonstrators went ahead anyway and were attacked by the Ertzainza (Spanish-Basque police) and a number of arrests were made although these were later released.

In recent years the the Spanish state has banned three other Basque political parties, two of them last year alone. The lawyer representing one of these stated that case against them revealed a frightening level of Spanish state surveillance as well as absurd reasoning. Some of the objections to participants or signatories in favour (of the thousands required by Spanish state law to permit a party to stand in elections) has deduced “terrorist” connections from the fact that someone corresponded with a political prisoner (an act not yet illegal in the state) or that another participated in a banned street demonstration ten years previously.

CONDEMNED BY THE UNITED NATIONS
Ironically, only a couple of weeks before the most recent banning, Martin Scheinin, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, accused the Spanish state of using such a wide application of its definition of “support for an armed organisation” in its Law of Political Parties that any grouping that has the same ultimate aims as ETA can be banned, even when their methods of working for those aims are all entirely legal. This is the law that Avigdor Leiberman, leader of the ultra-Zionist party Yisrael Beiteinu, which was successful in the recent Israeli elections, stated that he would like to have in Israel. ETA says that it wishes to see an independent, united socialist and Basque-speaking republic and recently called for the Basque people to be permitted to consider this option, among others, without interference by the Spanish and French states. Askatasuna and Demokrazia 3 M also want this but work politically for it. The Spanish state declared the youth organisation SEGI to be a “terrorist” organisation in 2007 and last year banned the Pro-Amnistia organisation and arrested its leaders. In recent years it has also closed a number of newspapers.

The fact that all charges to do with “terrorism” are treated by the special no-jury Audiencia Nacional court in Madrid and against whose judgements appeals are only possible to the Spanish Supreme court was another aspect criticised by the UN Rapporteur.

ALSO CONDEMNED BY EU, AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL AND OTHER NGOs.
Expressing his concern at wide-scale allegations of torture against the Guardia Civil and the Policia Nacional (through which most of the “confessions” of “terrorism” are obtained, according to detainees and to a number of human rights organisations), the UN Rapporteur joined a long list of critics of this practice, including the Committee for the Prevention of Torture of the European Union as recently as last year, along with CBT, a coalition of 44 anti-torture organisations within the Spanish state. Amnesty International also condemns the state annually. The Basque anti-torture organisation TAT this month published its report on 2008, listing 62 separate Basque testimonies of substantial torture but pointing out that this cannot be a complete list, given the fear of further torture of some victims as well as the reluctance of some other victims to revisit their experiences. The types of physical torture most often mentioned are constant blows to areas where bruising is rare, including genitals; sexual organs and anal molestation (including penetration with objects); asphyxiation by plastic bag; forced unusual physical postures. Mental tortures included forced nudity, humiliating personal comments, forcing victims to sing the Spanish national or even fascist anthems, threats to family and partners, threats of rape to victims or their partners, threats to kill, threats to use electric shock torture or asphyxiation, sleep deprivation, daylight deprivation.

All of the above tortures occurred during the five-day incommunicado detention permitted by Spanish state law and were used, stated TAT, either to obtain incriminating statements or to punish Basque activists. In its introduction the report makes the point that torture has as its first aim the breaking down of the personality of the individual and has ill-effects long after the event.

REPRESSION AND DEPOPULATION BY THE FRENCH STATE
Although the French state has not been implicated in torture of detainees, human rights campaigners complain that it has delivered political refugees to the Spanish state both through its legal procedures and also illegally by merely handing them over to the Guardia Civil at their border. Basque pro-independence activists also accuse the French state of depopulating the Basque countryside (on their side of the border) of youth through under-development, while at the same time the coastal regions are becoming retirement areas for French and German settlers. The French state, like the Spanish, has a large number of Basque political prisoners which, also like the Spanish, it distributes throughout its state as far as possible away from the prisoners' homeland and therefore from their families. Between both states the total of political prisoners has climbed to 765, already the highest number since the days of Franco, but shows no sign of ceasing to rise. In Bilbao last month, over 37,300 people marched in support of the prisoners.

The level of repression of Basque political activists in the Spanish state was eloquently expressed in more personal or human terms by two Basque political activists speaking at separate and unconnected events in Dublin this month. The Basque youth organisation Kamaradak's representative Igor, addressing a meeting organised by the Dublin branch of the Irish Basque Solidarity Committees on the 13th February, stated that although he was under 25 years of age, he was being faced with stark alternatives: either to get out of political activity or to go to prison for up to thirty years. Speaking at Sinn Féin's Ard-Fheis in Dublin last weekend, Kattalin Madariaga, a Basque pro-independence MP stated that a number of those who had preceded her to Ireland from her movement in recent years were now in prison, including a former MEP (Karmelo Landa) and her predecessor at last year's Ard-Fheis, Iñaki Olalde, who had been arrested and jailed two weeks previously.

Recently too, ten prominent activists in various arenas of Basque society took the unprecedented step of announcing publicly their intention to join ETA. Four of them even allowed themselves to be photographed by the Basque pro-independence Left newspaper GARA. They stated that they had seen friends and colleagues who were working in their arenas arrested, tortured and then jailed for alleged connections with an armed organisation, although their only “crime” was to work legally for the independence of their country and to oppose Spanish hegemony. If that was to be their future, they said, they might as well join the armed organisation and go on the run.

The Basque anti-repression organisation Askapena called again recently for international support for the Basque pro-independence left movement and opposition to repression and torture. In response to its call, in recent weeks acts of solidarity from Basque solidarity committees have been seen in 14 countries. These ranged from a 15-minute occupation of their national TV offices by Milan activists protesting biased reporting to a 15-metre banner stating that “The Basque Country does not walk alone towards democracy and freedom!” unfolded at the recent Celtic-Rangers match in Glasgow. Public protests in Ireland took place not only in the cities of the current Irish Basque Solidarity Committees of Dublin, Belfast and Cork but also in Derry, Omagh, Lurgan, Strabane and Newcastle. An Askapena representative noted that the international protests this year were a two-fold increase on those of last year both in terms of locations of actions and of numbers of personnel participating but also called for solidarity actions to continue throughout the year and to keep raising awareness of the situation in the Basque Country.

Montage of 3 DM poster, police repression and arrest of a 3DM leader and colleagues protesting

Plainclothes and uniformed Ertzainza (Spanish-Basque police) pounce on demonstrators protesting banning of Basque parties at rally of ruling PNV (Basque conservative party)

Demonstration Bilbao in support of Basque political prisoners in January