PARTICIPATION IN THE SEMINAR “LESSONS FROM THE DEFEAT OF ETA”

On October 20, MEP Javier Zarzalejos participated in the seminar “Lessons from the defeat of ETA”, organized by the Center for the Common Good of the Francisco de Vitoria University (UFV) together with the Victims of Terrorism Foundation (FVT) and the Isabel la Católica School of Government and Leadership, in the Europa room of the Senate, in a panel on the anti-terrorist pacts together with the former Minister of the Presidency of Spain and former vice-president of the Basque Government, Ramón Jáuregui, moderated by the professor and columnist of the newspaper El Mundo, Javier Redondo.

In his speech, Zarzalejos reviewed the pacts over the last few years and stressed that “on the one hand, they have the logic of maintaining basic consensus even in extraordinarily tense moments for Spanish politics and, in the case of the anti-terrorist pacts, they also reflect a learning process of what the reality of terrorism was, of what were the real strategies or the most effective strategies to face it, of how society evolved and how the political forces and the institutions themselves also evolved”.

The first pact, that of Ajuria Enea in 1988, took place for the MEP in a “moment of extraordinary activity of ETA and in a social environment in which ETA clearly had more than sympathy, it had an explicit support of a part of the Basque society” and counted on the “ideological legitimization that nationalism lent to ETA”.

Then, after the kidnapping and murder of Miguel Angel Blanco, came the Estella Pact, in his opinion, “the antithesis of the Ajuria Enea Pact, the negation of what the Ajuria Enea Pact means, the establishment once again of the dividing line between nationalists and non-nationalists and gave reason to those of us who argued that the political and ideological-cultural legitimization of nationalism towards ETA terrorism had not disappeared”.

In the same way that the Estella Pact is a negation of the Ajuria Enea Pact, for Javier Zarzalejos, the Pact for Freedoms and Against Terrorism is, “a historical turning point in the right direction. It means that the fundamental idea of ETA’s invincibility is not accepted, ETA can be defeated, ETA is beatable and the infinite tie between the State of Law and ETA cannot be accepted, and it means that the two parties, the party that was governing then and the party that could govern, claim for themselves the decisions on the anti-terrorist strategy that has to mark the fight against ETA from then on”.

For the MEP, what was fundamental and is the great fissure that opened with the PNV, was that PP and PSOE said “this is as far as we have come and we are going to establish the anti-terrorist strategy and we are going to establish it on the basis that we are committed to the defeat of ETA, we are going to continue supporting the mobilization of the Basque society and we are going to provide the rule of law with those instruments that are necessary”.

Asked about the end of ETA, Zarzalejos pointed out that he cannot be satisfied with “only a police defeat” and demanded a defeat of the terrorist group ETA also in the political and social sphere, which has not been “proportional to the operational defeat”.

“We cannot be satisfied with a police defeat alone, when there are 200,000 Basques who are out of their place, when there are too many cases still to be clarified about which there has been no cooperation from the terrorists or the prisoners who are in jail”, he concluded.

He also wanted to refer to the declarations of the PSOE spokesperson in the Madrid City Council, Reyes Maroto, who said that “with Bildu we improve the life of the Spanish people”. “To me my flesh opens up, when you hear people say and declare that Bildu has improved the quality of life of Spaniards. It seems to me that it is an outrage. It seems to me that it is trivializing what Bildu has meant,” Zarzalejos affirmed.