Spanish government moves to ban Basque parties linked to ETA
The Spanish government said Friday it had authorized legal action to outlaw two Basque parties close to Batasuna, the banned political wing of the armed separatist group ETA, to prevent them fielding candidates in the March 9 general election.
Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said the government had proof that the Basque Nationalist Action (ANV) party and the Communist Party of the Basque Lands (PCTV) had close ties to Batasuna and would ask the Supreme Court to ban the two parties.
"Neither PCTV nor ANV will take part in the elections," she told a news conference after a weekly cabinet meeting where the measure was approved.
The Supreme Court banned Batasuna in 2003 because it refused to condemn violence and cut its links to ETA.
The separatist group has been blamed for the deaths of 819 people in Spain over almost four decades of fighting for the independence of the Basque region in northern Spain and parts of southwestern France.
Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has adopted a hard line against ETA since the group called off a 15-month ceasefire in June.
Since it was banned, Batasuna has turned to little-known, almost dormant parties to field candidates that back Basque independence in elections.
PCTV won seven seats in the Basque regional parliament in 2005 elections while ANV won 437 seats in towns and villages in the Basque region last year even though half of its candidates were banned from running.
Earlier this week Justice Minister Mariano Fernandez Bermejo said a police investigation had revealed the existence of a central fund that financed Batasuna and the other two parties.
The police probe, launched after most of Batasuna's leaders were arrested in October, also showed that ANV and PCTV "are part of a Batasuna network and therefore are in the service of ETA," the minister said.
Spain's top anti-terrorist judge, Baltasar Garzon, on Tuesday summoned representatives of the two parties to appear before him early next month, one day after he received a copy of the results of the police investigation.
The conservative opposition Popular Party, which trails the Socialists by a slim margin in opinion surveys, has long demanded that the government ban the two parties.
It accuses the government of dragging its feet on the issue in order to ban the parties as close to the election day as possible so as to look tough against ETA in the eyes of voters just as they prepare to cast ballots.
The Popular Party has hammered Zapatero for having tried to negotiate peace with ETA. The government called off the tentative peace talks after ETA set off a bomb at Madrid's main airport in December 2006, killing two men.
Popular Party Secretary General Angel Acebes accused Zapatero of lying, saying he knew ANV and PCTV had links to ETA yet he allowed them to run in recent local and regional elections while his government negotiated with the outfit.
"He can't be trusted with the essential, like the defense of Spain as a nation," Acebes said after the government announced it would seek to have to two parties banned.
De la Vega said the government could only act once it had collected enough evidence to back its claim that the two parties are linked to Batasuna.
"The government never acts for opportunistic reasons, only for legal ones," she said.
Both Batasuna and ETA are considered to be terrorist organisations by the European Union and the United States.
AFP
