ABSTRACT
A leadership in jail On May 22, 2007, Otegi and Etxeberria were traveling back home by train, knowing that the peace process had totally collapsed, that ETA’s ceasefire was about to be broken. The city of Paris was visible in the distance when Etxeberria said: “This model of negotiation and strategy is over.”1 On June 6, ETA announced the end of the ceasefire. Only two days later, the Spanish Supreme Court ordered that Otegi, the main leader of the outlawed Batasuna, be jailed. He was sentenced to fifteen months’ imprisonment because in December 2003 he had taken part in an event honoring a late leader of ETA, José Miguel Beñaran “Argala,” killed in 1978 by the Spanish death squads of the BVE.2 Otegi had been sentenced in April 2006, had appealed against the sentence, and had been waiting for the ruling since then. Not surprisingly, the ratification of the sentence came only after the end of ETA ceasefire. When I interviewed Otegi in 2009, he acknowledged that his imprisonment in 2007-8 was to a great extent a relief. He had worked to build the 2005-7 peace process since the beginning of the decade. He had engaged in some fruitful negotiations with his political rivals, but he had lost an internal fight, which led the Nationalist Left to miss the chance of a way out of the conflict. Now, he needed time to reflect on what had happened, and what should be done next. The rest of the members of Batasuna’s leadership remained free only for a few further months. In October 2007, twenty-three members of Batasuna were arrested, most of them members of the leadership, including Etxeberria. Otegi was the undisputed leader of Batasuna and the best-known leading member of the whole Nationalist Left. Involved in ETA (pm), Otegi went into hiding in 1977, when he was nineteen. He was a member of the faction that eventually joined the milis in 1984. Arrested in 1987, he was sentenced to six years of imprisonment for a kidnapping, absolved from two other accusations of abduction, and released in 1993 after having served his sentence. He obtained a degree in Philosophy while in prison. As an HB candidate, he was elected a member of the Basque parliament in 1995.3 When the whole Ruling Council of HB was imprisoned in 1997, he was named one of the two spokespersons of the new leadership, alongside Joseba Permach. By the time he signed the
Lizarra-Garazi Agreement in 1998 in the name of his party immediately after the Good Friday Agreement in Belfast, he was referred to by many as the “Basque Gerry Adams.” Since then, Otegi has been the most prominent leader of a generation of veteran politicians in the Nationalist Left. Etxeberria, who was one of Otegi’s partners in the negotiation of Loiola, was also imprisoned in 1981 in connection with ETA, and served two years. Since 1988 he has been a member of the Ruling Council of HB. He was among the leaders imprisoned in 1997, and he is the only one of them who has endured in the leadership of the Nationalist Left’s political party over the decade of the 2000s. The preventive incarceration of the leadership of Batasuna in 2007 left the political party of the Nationalist Left with no ability to properly discuss the outcome of the failed peace process and the near future strategy. Batasuna had been an illegal political party since 2002, but it had always managed to keep its network and maintain political activity. Yet, the arrest of almost the whole leadership in 2007 left Batasuna in its worst condition since its foundation. Younger, inexperienced leaders replaced the jailed ones in a state of disorientation within the Nationalist Left after the internally controversial outcome of the peace process, which “generated frustration and the growing sense of another missed opportunity,” as put by Gorka Elejabarrieta, an author and a leading member of the Nationalist Left.4 Etxeberria contends that the aftermath of the 2007 arrests was a period of “confusion” within the movement, a period with no clear strategy and no ability to clarify the strategy because of the repression. The Nationalist Left acted “by inertia.”5 The incarcerated members of the leadership of Batasuna were dispersed, as were all prisoners of ETA and other organizations of the Nationalist Left. Otegi, with no Batasuna colleagues beside him in Martutene prison in San Sebastian, elaborated “a dense document” arguing for “a change of strategy and cycle,” which he directed “to whom it might concern in the exterior.”6 When he referred to “a change of strategy and cycle,” he surely meant the end of armed struggle. By the time Otegi left prison after having served his sentence in August 2008, those whom Otegi believed to be “concerned” knew what he stood for.
