By Tito Drago
MADRID, May 7 2001 (IPS)

Basque voters in northern Spain will respond to the violence waged by the illegal separatist group ETA next Sunday at the polls, the leading candidates for the presidency of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country and human rights leaders said Monday.

Five rights organisations also called on Basque citizens Monday to vote in the parliamentary elections under the slogan “Forward, citizens! To the polls! Viva freedom!”

The current president of the Basque Country and candidate for the moderate Nationalist Basque-Eusko Alkatasuna Party, Juan José Ibarretxe, and his rivals Jaime Mayor Oreja of the centre-right Popular Party (PP) and Nicolás Redondo Terreros of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), attended the funeral Monday of Manuel Giménez Abad, the head of the PP in the Autonomous Community of Aragon.

Giménez Abad was shot and killed Sunday by two members of the terrorist group ETA on a downtown street in Zaragoza, the capital of Aragon. He and his 17-year-old son were on their way to a football game.

The assassination was the first perpetrated since the campaign for the Basque country parliamentary elections got underway two weeks ago, and it dashed the hopes of the moderate nationalists that ETA would maintain a de facto truce during the elections.

The murder of the unarmed Giménez Abad, who was without bodyguards at the time of his death, received a vastly different response from Euskal Herritarrok (EH), the coalition that supports and is supported by ETA, and the parties that hold most of the seats in the Basque country parliament – Ibarretxe’s moderate nationalists, the PP and the PSOE.

EH candidate Arnaldo Otegui blamed the rest of the parties for the climate of violence, and for the first time his coalition did not even “lament” the murder.

EH leaders traditionally use the term “lament,” rather than “condemning”, “rejecting” or “repudiating” ETA violence like the other parties.

Mayor Oreja said Monday at the ceremony held to pay homage to Giménez Abad in the Aragon regional parliament that the murder presented Basque citizens with “an opportunity to respond to ETA at the polls.”

PSOE secretary-general José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero declared that “neither ETA nor the violence will stand in the way of the electoral process.”

Ibarretxe’s spokesman Josu Imaz stated, meanwhile, that “ETA will not condition” next Sunday’s elections.

Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, Ibarretxe, Redondo Terreros, Mayor Oreja and other political leaders, as well as prominent labour and human rights activists, took part in the funeral held Monday in Zaragoza, 325 kms northeast of Madrid.

The unity of the moderate nationalists, the PP and PSOE in rejecting the use of violence could further isolate the supporters of ETA.

The latest opinion polls published by Spain’s five leading newspapers, including El Diario Vasco of the Basque city of San Sebastian, forecast a major drop in votes for the EH, which could lose six or seven of its current 14 seats in the regional parliament.

But surveys by El País, La Razón and ABC indicate that the two large non-nationalist parties – the PP and PSOE, which signed an electoral pact – could win 37 seats, one short of an absolute majority.

If that occurs, the decisive votes in the parliamentay election for the presidency could be cast by the small United Left (IU) coalition, led by the Communist Party, which according to the polls stands to win three seats.

The new president of the Basque country could also be determined by the votes of the EH, which in the previous legislature contributed to Ibarretxe’s triumph.

The third key variable is the large proportion of undecided voters who, along with what is predicted to be the highest turnout in the history of the Basque country, could hand a victory to the non-nationalist parties.

On Monday, the newspaper El Diario Vasco did not hesitate to state that the 50,000 voters who according to the polls are “undecided” would define the outcome of the elections.

The pollsters themselves say the number of respondents marking the “don’t know/refuse to answer” box is bigger in the Basque country than in other regions of Spain – a phenomenon they attribute to fear.

The human rights groups Foro Ermua, Movement Against Intolerance, Association of Victims of Terrorism, El Salvador Forum and the Catalonian Association for Tolerance issued a statement Monday urging those who are afraid or who do not fully understand what is happening in the Basque country to go to the polls.

Esteban Ibarra, the president of the Movement Against Intolerance, told IPS that everyone should turn out to vote on May 13 in order “for this country to be ours, and so we won’t have to live as subtenants of the nationalists.

“We must reconquer peace without paying anything for doing so, without humbling ourselves,” said Ibarra. In order for that to occur, election day “will have to be a day of joy, of hope, so we can see a future without limitations or fears, without pistols or screams,” he added.

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