New party awakens peace hopes in Spain's Basque region (News Feature)

By Sinikka Tarvainen Feb 8, 2011, 13:16 GMT

Madrid - The launch of a new Basque separatist party was Tuesday fanning hopes of peace in the troubled northern Spanish region, after more than four decades of separatist bloodshed.

'The cycle of armed struggle has closed,' said Rufi Etxeberria, a representative of Sortu, the first radical separatist party to explicitly distance itself from the violence of the armed separatist group ETA.

Spanish politicians, however, received such statements with skepticism, wavering between a positive impression made by the new party and their distrust of the radicals who launched it.

ETA's violence has plagued Spain since 1968, claiming about 850 lives in a violent campaign that was interrupted by around a dozen ceasefires.

ETA's political wing Batasuna was outlawed in 2003, and the current law bans any similar parties unless they unambiguously sever ties with the group.

Sortu tried to do just that, saying it 'rejected' all political violence including that of ETA, 'should it occur.'

The wording sparked a debate on whether the party had distanced itself from ETA sufficiently for it to be authorized. A 'rejection' was not a 'condemnation,' and Sortu was only rejecting future instead of past attacks, conservative commentators argued.

The creation of Sortu followed other signs that peace could be closer than ever before.

The signs included international pressure - including a declaration signed by several Nobel Peace Prize laureates - and a ceasefire announced by ETA in September.

The group reinforced the truce in January, making it permanent, general and verifiable. ETA has not killed anyone since shooting a police officer dead in France in March 2010.

The engine of change - analysts said - was a growing perception among ETA's entourage that the group's armed struggle had led nowhere.

ETA's car bombings and shootings have undermined its popularity, turning the vast majority of the Basques against the group, while more than 600 ETA members have ended up behind bars.

Batasuna and most related groups now want ETA to lay down arms, arguing that its violent campaign paved the way for the launch of a new and peaceful separatist movement.

Police experts, however, believe Batasuna's influence on ETA is limited, and that the armed group is split internally over the possibility of a military surrender.

ETA 'retains its entire structure, and reserves itself the right to kill again whenever it considers that the state is not making sufficient concessions to its political demands,' the daily El Mundo said in an editorial.

Those demands include negotiations on Basque independence - a taboo subject for Spain.

'There is still a long way to go' before the conflict is solved, Deputy Prime Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba warned.

Skeptics saw Sortu as only a revamped Batasuna seeking a way to contest the Basque municipal elections in May.

The government said it would hand the question over to the judiciary, which was to examine Sortu's statutes and to decide whether it should be allowed to become a legal party.

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