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Tuesday, November 24, 1998

1. Prisoners-for-peace: France joins Spain in pseudo peace process
2. Interview: Freedom is not given, it's taken. M. Irizarri

1. Prisoners-for-peace: France joins Space in pseudo peace process

(November 25, 1998) -- French President Jacques Chirac and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar agreed at their annual summit meeting last Saturday to maintain their "anti-terror" collaboration despite the indefinite truce implemented by the Basque armed organization Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA, Basque Homeland and Freedom) on Sept 18. Paris said it was prepared to consider any request from Madrid to further the "peace process" but would not take part in possible talks with ETA thus, trying to maintain the myth the conflict with Euskal Herria is not an international issue.

The meeting in the western French port of La Rochelle focused on "peace," rather than "violence" in Euskal Herria, officials from Madrid and Paris told reporters.

Earlier this month Aznar approved contacts with ETA "to see how serious ETA is about giving up armed struggle for ever." Aznar has told Chirac the cease-fire offered the first real opportunity to "end violence" in Euskal Herria, officials said.

But the Spanish government has ruled out any political debate on Basque demands such as self-determination in talks with ETA. Madrid said will only negotiate a solution to its Basque political prisoners and terms for ETA to surrender its weapons, but nothing more.

"In the peace process this is all there is to talk about," government spokesman Josep Pique said earlier this month.

French officials sources said Paris "would also consider making concessions" to Euskadi Ta Askatasuna and Iparretarrak by transferring its nearly 70 Basque political prisoners held in Paris to prisons in Euskal Herria, the Spanish media reported.

The Basque armed organization Iparretarrak (IK, Those of the North) also declared a cease-fire following the ETA truce. IK operates in Euskal Herria north, in France.

A main demand by Basque society is that the nearly 600 Basque prisoners scattered across Spain and France be transferred to jails in Euskal Herria before Christmas.

Prime Minister Aznar said a "peace process" will be established as proposed by Articles 9, 10 and 12 of Spain's Anti-Terrorism Pact with its Basque allies. The Pact "seeks the assimilation into society of those persons who decide or have decided to abandon the use of violence and to defend their ideas through democratic channels."

The ETA communique announcing the truce gives priority to "nation-building" and leaves in the hands of the nationalist parties the task of creating a national institution in which all seven Basque provinces would be represented.

The Basque political party Herri Batasuna (HB) announced last month a proposal to create a "national assembly" of Basque municipalities. The assembly would debate common issues such as culture and sports.

At the meeting, French and Spanish authorities discussed at length the "Basque peace process", which could have implications for France, the Spanish media reported.

Basque municipalities with a nationalist majority in the seven Basque provinces, including those in the three provinces in France, would have representation in the Basque "national assembly" proposed by HB.

French President Jacques Chirac's spokesman Catherine Colonna said Paris will continue collaborating with Madrid against the Basque opposition. "We intend to continue our good cooperation on the basis of solidarity," Colonna told reporters.

In an apparent move to put pressure on ETA to accept Madrid's prisoners-for- peace deal, Spain declared illegal the political group K.A.S., and France will expel a Basque refugee to Spain.

The Spanish National Court (created by the Francoist regime) last Friday ruled that K.A.S. , an organization in the Basque National Liberation Movement, is part of the ETA structure and thus illegal.

Basque political prisoner Jose Xabier Zabaleta Elosegi finished serving a sentence in France on Friday and faces imminent expulsion to Spain. Paris and Madrid agreed to the expulsion of all Basque political prisoners who cannot be extradited to Spain to be prosecuted for offenses for which they were convicted in France. Expulsion is an administrative procedure that does not require a judicial procedure.

"Anti-terror" collaboration between Paris and Madrid will continue until ETA quits armed struggle and dissolve itself, Spanish media reported citing officials from both countries.

2. Freedom is not given, it's taken

Marcos Irizarry is a playwright and defender of human rights who came with his father to Chile from his native Basque Country when he was only 2. A survivor of the Chilean fascist military junta (1973-1989) of Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Marcos changed his name, returned to Chile, and created a travelling theatre group that went from village to village performing socio-political plays that spread hope while the country was under a fascist dictatorship. Marcos is brave, rebellious, and unbashedly political, preaching a message of Latin America's emancipation from Europe and the United States. He has remained compassionate and optimistic, and it is just these values that he has brought to his work in the theatre. During his years with the travelling theatre group in Chile, Marcos was subjected to harassment by police and imprisoned for two years without a trial, accused of subversion. Ina Davant interviewed him in Mexico earlier this month.

Question: You were very young when you met Victor Jara. What memories do you have of him?

Answer: Victor was a composer, folk singer, and theatre director who sang of love, tenderness, and hope in the language of the humble. He was a pioneer of Chile's "new song' which ruffled the country's upper-crust and cost him his life. Victor became very popular among students like me , and the Left, and a strong supported of the government of Salvador Allende. His songs became our songs or, to be more precise, the songs of the part of Chilean society that shared Victor's views and dreams.

Q: September 11, 1973 found you in Santiago. What do you remember of those first days of the coup?

A: The morning of the coup my father had gone to the Universidad Tecnica where he worked, and an exhibition against fascism was to open in the evening. The situation was still very confused but most people knew that a right-wing military coup was possible. My father took me with him to the university, where the students and workers were being transferred to another building more secured. Victor, who also worked at the university, was there to cheer up the students and workers. At night, the military surrounded and assaulted the university. They broke into the building and beat the students with the butt of their riffles. A cameraman put himself in front of the soldiers who shot him death. Some students, like myself, were able to get out of the building and escape. Those who were caught inside, like my father and Victor, were taken to the Estadio de Chile. My father, a survivor, said the stadium resounded with the groans of the victims, and that some prisoners went mad and threw themselves down from the top of the stadium; others cried and ran and the soldiers beat them until they died, and that those the fascists said were "foreigners, agents of international communism" suffered special agonies. Two days later most prisoners were taken to another stadium, but others remained and were taken to the "death chambers" and tortured to death. A student who managed to come out alive told us that Victor was among the prisoners taken to the "death chamber"; they were stretched out on the ground and attacked furiously by the soldiers. There they died, beaten to death by the irrational hatred of fascism.

Q: Many people like you and your father were forced to leave Chile after the coup. But a not too long after the coup you went back and created a travelling theatre group. What did you hope to accomplish? Was that your own way of fighting the dictator?

A: What you can do depends on what the conditions are, where you are, what can be done. The fascist junta showed a special hatred for the creators of culture and their works. In Latin America it is difficult to reach people with the printed word. There are two forms of censorhip there. The first is that of the dictatorships, the regimes that forbid the circulation of ideas. The other censorship is invisible, it is structural censorship that has produced in Latin America an enormous number of people who will never read the works of the dissident writers, for the simple reason that they do not know how to read, and a greater number still who do not have the money to buy the books they write. At that time, a travelling theatre seemed to us a better way to try to reach people.

Q: When did you first came into active contact with theatre? When did you write your first play and how it was born out?

A: It was in Cuba that I first came into active contact with theatre. Cantata de Chile, based on the strike of the nitrate workers strike in 1907 and their massacre, was being filmed there and I used to come by the sets and watch. There I met some students who were doing socialized theatre. They invited me to join their troupe, and I accepted. I had studied drama and with a Chilean friend, we decided to do something that required a lot of bravado: we decided to write our own play. We wrote it with lots of parts for the students in the group. Our play was called Camino a Santiago (road to Santiago), and born out of a particular social and spiritual climate.

Q: Let's speak about transcendental realities, about the importance of dreams and imaginations in Latin American cultures.

A: I do not think that those things are the privilege of Latin America alone. I studied various Jesuist texts on their experience with the Iroquois in the 17th-century. The Jesuits wondered about the Iroquois' faith in dreams -- was it proof of demonic possession or simple stupidity? The basic premise was that the Indians were ignorant, that they had no culture, that their ways were only a form of ignorance. The question regarding dreams was thus a confirmation of the Indians' backwardness. The Iroquois believe that the spirit speaks to the body and gives it direct orders through dreams. If the body does not obey its orders, the spirit will become angry and take revenge on the body by making it sick and killing it. Consequently, it was very important to the Iroquois that they know how to interpret dreams. Because dreams speak through symbolic language, it was through symbolic means, through the development of collective theater, that their meaning could be achieved.

Q: What do you see in the Native American cultures that could apply to our modern world?

A: First, there is the ancient model of community -- a means of production and a way of life centered on solidairty, not on greed. Second, there is a relationship of communion with nature, a way of life in which nature, is not an object to be used or a source of profit, but a source of life and wisdom. Third are the traditions of freedom, which were not characteristic of the great imperial centers that existed when Columbus reached these shores. In the Inca and Aztec capitals, in those vertical societes of masters and slaves, there was no freedom. But in the rest of the Americas there was freedom to an extent that has not been equaled. It was not by chance that Chief Nicaragua asked the Spanish conquistadors: "Your king, who has elected your king?" He had himself been elected by an assembly of people from his tribes. The same tradition marks peoples as remote from each other as the Iroquois and the Guaranis who have perpetuated the memory of democracy, an American democracy in which women paticipated to an extent unknown in 16th-century Europe, and which we only begin to appreciate today.

Q: Let's talk about those attempts to move Chile toward economic progress and political stability; the promotion of native industry of the foreign-dominated industry.

A: Paraguay was a pioneer. Between 1811 and 1866, a state-directed program of autonomous economic development turned Paraguay into one of the most progressive and prosperous states in Latin America. This progress was destroyed by the war of the Triple Alliance. In Chile, Francisco Bilbao threw a bombshell in 1844 with his famous essay on the nature of Chilean society which startled the aristocratic society of Santiago. He said "Slavery, degradation: that is the past" and "Our past is Spain. Spain is the Middle Ages." Well, he was tried and condemned for blasphemy, sedition, and immorality. He lost his university chair, and his book was officially burned by the public hangman. Jose Lastarria also caused a stir with his investigations on the Spanish colonial system in Chile, an effective case against the Spanish colonial regime. Laten on, in the 1880s, president Jose Manuel Balmaceda offered a nationalistic program for a many-sided economic development that includes the promotion of native industry and the Chileanization of the British-dominated nitrate industry. His program provoked a revolt by right-wing forces, supported by British interests, that led to Balmaceda's defeat and alleged suicide in 1891. In my opinion, these were the roots of what later the U.S. refered to as "radical nationalism" in Latin America, which embraced policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the living standards of the masses on the principle that the first beneficiaries of the country's resources are the people of the country. At the famous hemispheric conference in February 1945, the U.S. imposed what was called an economic charter for the Americas which called for an end to economic nationalism in all its forms, for the beneficiaries of a country's resources need to be instead the U.S., the investors and the local elites who are associated with them.

Q: The U.S. said the government of Allende threatened its interests and seeked its defeat.

A: Allende won the the presidential elections in 1970 with a program for the nationalization of foreign-owned natural resources, key industries and banks as well as a sweeping land reform and one year later his government had strengthened its position by victory in the municipal elections. The U.S., which made frantic efforts to prevent the presidential elections and inauguration of Allende, and pressured the military to intervene through a coup, then denied credits to Chile and employed other methods of economic warfare, which synchronized with Chile's capitalists and landed oligarchs created an economic chaos. The reactionary opposition profited by the discontent of large sectors of the urban middle class, which resented the hardships of growing inflation and shortage of goods, and the decline of the standard of living. This created the moment for the military revolt of September 11, 1973. Allende heroically defended the presidential palace and refusing to surrender, allegedly killed himself.

Q: Some people think there is a calculated initiative behind the arrest of Gen. Pinochet. What do you think?

A: Judge Garzon is known to have political ambitions and was a junior minister of interior in the previous Socialist government, which organized, funded, and directed the death-squads in Euskal Herria. He walked out and was upset about being passed over for the post of minister of interior, went back to the Francoist court, and re-opened the GAL death-squads case, but many people knew the investigation would never reach the Moncloa palace, the people who masterminded the dirty war. The Socialists lost office to the (right-wing) Popular Party and have been losing popularity since the scandals of corruption and the dirty war. The investigation into the torture and killings by the Argentinian military junta of Spanish citizens, and the implication of Pinochet in the case, had the support of the Socialist party, which itself fought a dirty war. A calculated initiative aimed at gaining back support for the Socialists is an speculation but I think it's not unreasonable.

Q: Should Gen. Pinochet be extradited to Spain?

A: No, he ought to be returned to Chile and tried there. It is our responsibility, indeed our obligation as citizens of Chile, to compel the Chilean government to do it. States have legal obligations but their citizens can influence them to act morally responsible and in legally admissible ways, or can allow them to act quite differently. It is the moral responsibility of the Chilean people to demand that Pinochet and others who carried these crimes against humanity be brought before justice and tried. I think though he ought to be prosecuted by an international criminal court. An independent judiciary inquiry, if existed, as it should, would lead to Henry Kissinger, who implemented Nixon's Chilean policy, first as national security adviser and then as secretary of state. The U.S. terrorist activities against Chile from 1960 to 1973 included everything from murder of civilians to strangulation of the Chilean economy and subversion of its legally elected government. It came as no surprise that Kissinger dedicated 31 pages of his book, White House Years, to his defense of what he did in Chile; an attempt to deform the truth so that his readers may absolve him of his responsibility for the years of suffering, humiliation, death and misery that his actions and those of his government caused to Chile. No wonder the U.S. vetoed the creation of an international world court on war crimes.

Q: After the coup, the U.S. Congress resolved in 1976 and 1977 to suspend economic and military aid to various countries, and Jimmy Carter was concerned about human rights being violated in Latin America.

A: Most U.S. external aid doesn't go through the congressional filter, so despite pronouncements, resolutions and protests, Pinochet's regime got $200 million of direct U.S. aid in 1976 without congressional authorization. Carter's concerns about the butchery in some Latin American countries seems healthy but the dictators are not self-taught. They learned the techniques of repression and the arts of government at academies run by the Pentagon in the U.S. and Panama.

Q: You go often to Euskal Herria and are familiar with the crisis there; have relatives imprisoned. Do you see a grain of hope anywhere after ETA implemented a truce; after the end of armed struggle?

A: First of all, I don't think armed struggle prevented reaching a solution, but the fact that the PNV is the main beneficiary of "Basque autonomy" and always feared that a settlement between the Spanish government and ETA would leave them out. They shared with Madrid a plan against the sector of Basque society for independence and did not promote talks until ETA was sufficiently weakened, which is what the so-called ZEN politico-military plan against the Basque national liberation movement had prescribed. So far there are declarations and alleged secret pacts, but no plan has been made explaining in detail what is that they want and how they intend to achieve it. I think we will have to wait to know what's really happening.

Q: There is a nationalist agreement known as the Lizarra-Garazi Declaration.

A: It is a positive step but still we don't know what the "territoriality" they want recognized by Spain means. The PNV and its cronies say it means a "common culture" and that ETA agrees. HB says they will create a Basque "national assembly" to debate common issues on culture and sports, but the declaration doesn't indicate what has to be negotiated with Spain, and the prisoners ought not to be used as hostages by the states.

Q: One last question. The PNV is talking about self-determination, and pushing for a peace-process. Don't you think that progress is being made?

A: The concept of "peace process" is too broad. Everyone wants peace, even Hitler. The question always is: On what terms? Under whose directions? On the other hand, the PNV has been talking about self-determination since Sabino Arana created the party, but I think after Arana died it's been all rhetoric. If the PNV really wanted a referendum they would call it, include all the options and then show Madrid the results: this is what the people has decided. Freedom is not given, it's taken. They have a parliament and, tell us, they are a "new majority." But I'm not sure they want to do that. Last I checked, Xabier Arzalluz was saying that independence is not a priority of the signatories of the Lizarra-Garazi declaration. There is much ambiguity and contradictions in their statements. We will have to wait before trying to assess the situation.