ETA Blows up Spanish Parking Garage and Peace Talks

If Mr. Bush is serious about America fighting a war against terrorism anywhere in the world it raises its ugly head, then prepare to see GI Joe deployed to Spain. ETA, a Basque-nationalist group, blew up a multi-story parking garage in Madrid on Saturday despite having announced a “permanent ceasefire” about nine months ago. While the Spanish government believes that this is the end of peace talks, ETA claims the peace process is not broken. One is more prepared to believe the government.

Batasuna is the political party that fronts for the ETA terrorists, just like Sinn Fein did for the Irish Republican Army for decades. Pernando Barrena, a senior Batasuna leader, said from Bayonne, France, “There is no obvious evidence that the cease-fire has been broken. The political process has not been broken.” This from an organization that has killed 800 people since it started its armed resistance to Spanish rule in the 1960s.

To be fair, the Basque people do have a better claim to self-determination than, say, the Belgians. After all, the Basques are a distinct people witha unique culture and language, whereas Belgium is an historical accident binding the Walloons and Flemish together. Moreover, anyone who took up arms against Franco’s fascism in the 1960s was on the side of the angels. So, ETA isn’t quite Al-Qaeda. It isn’t quite the San Fermin Lawn Bowling Association either.

However, the government now in Madrid was freely elected, and it has been since the 1970s. Madrid has given the Spanish regions more autonomy than most other subnational groups in Europe enjoy (for example, Catalan has been raised to the level of an official European language at the insistence of the Spanish government). When the ceasefire began in March of 2006, there was genuine hope that some kind of accommodation could come about – once the killing stops, settlements get easier to make.

Those hopes are buried under 40,000 tons of concrete along with about 400 cars and a few innocent people. Most likely, there was some kind of dissent within Batasuna or ETA over the pace of the talks, and the hotheads decided to “send a message.” While there won’t be American troops on the streets of Pamplona anytime soon, this is a useful reminder that not all terrorists are Muslims, not all Muslims are terrorists, and that homegrown killers are ever bit as effective in eroding civilization as imported murderers.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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