http://www.freespeech.org/~ehj (updated) http://osis.ucsd.edu/~ehj http://www.contrast.org/mirrors/ehj/

BASQUE DELEGATION MEETS WITH CARTER CENTER OFFICIALS

Thursday, December 3, 1998

Members of the Basque nationalist groups, the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), Eusko Alkartasuna (EA), and Euskal Herritarrok (EH), approached the Carter Center in the United States to discuss how to find a peaceful solution to the Basque conflict, Spanish media reported on Tuesday.

The Spanish newspaper El Mundo had resported the Basque delegation wanted to see if the Carter Center could help mediate.

But the Basque leaders denied they were seeking mediation but to explain the situation in the Basque region of Bascongadas in Spain after ETA implemented a cease-fire in September 18.

The Spanish daily El Pais reported on Thursday that a spokesperson for the Carter Center, Carrie Harmon, said Carter has "much interest" in the "case" but would intervene only if all sides in the conflict wanted it. The Basque delegation met on Wednesday with a member of the Center, Harry Barnes, who agreed to "maintain contacts" with the Basque leaders, the newspaper reported.

Founded in 1986, the Carter Center is a privately-financed 25 million dollar Atlanta-based policy institute and presidential library that gave former U.S. president Jimmy Carter a new base for a role in foreign affairs.

Jimmy Carter, on a visit to Spain in October, said that "a permanent end to the violence in the Basque country should be negotiated without foreign involvement." His opinion coincides with that of Spain's Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar who rejects foreign mediation in the Basque "peace process."

The Spanish government has said they do not need any foreign mediators to help push along the "peace process."

Last year Spain and the U.S. signed an "anti-terror" agreement against "international terrorism" and "drug trafficking."

The annual report, Patterns of Global Terrorism, released by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albrigth last May, designated Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) as a "terrorist organization".

Basque nationalist leaders have toured several countries in Europe and the Americas asking for support to the nationalist agreement known as the Lizarra-Garazi Declaration, which obtained an indefinite truce by ETA.

In October, the signatories of the Lizarra Declaration forwarded a copy of their document to U.S. president Bill Clinton by way of Sinn Fein Gerry Adams who visited the U.S. in October.

Basque leaders have sought support from the U.S. before. After the Spanish Civil War, Basque leaders sought support from the U.S. to gain back the limited autonomy granted by the Spanish Second Republic to three Basque provinces but failed. Even some Basques allegedly worked for the C.I.A.

After the Second World War ended, Franco was identified with Hitler and Mussolini and Spain was boycotted by the international community. But in November 1947 the United Nations assembly lifted sanctions on Spain, and the U.S. delegate declared his support to Franco. The isolation of the dictator was broken by the U.S. granting the Francoist regime a loan of 62.5 million dollars in exchange for U.S. military bases in Spain.

Would Jimmy Carter be able to help the Basques? Let's take a look at his curriculum vitae and experience restoring democracy. Here are two articles: one by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon (Jimmy Carter and Human Rights: Behind the Media Myth), included in this mail, and the other by Noam Chomsky (Democracy Restored)

Jimmy Carter and Human Rights: Behind the Media Myth
By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

Jimmy Carter's reputation has soared lately.

Typical of the media spin was a Sept. 20 report on CBS Evening News, lauding Carter's "remarkable resurgence" as a freelance diplomat. The network reported that "nobody doubts his credibility, or his contacts."

For Jimmy Carter, the pact he negotiated in Haiti is the latest achievement of his long career on the global stage.

During his presidency, Carter proclaimed human rights to be "the soul of our foreign policy." Although many journalists promoted that image, the reality was quite different.

Inaugurated 13 months after Indonesia's December 1975 invasion of East Timor, Carter stepped up U.S. military aid to the Jakarta regime as it continued to murder Timorese civilians. By the time Carter left office, about 200,000 people had been slaughtered.

Elsewhere, despotic allies -- from Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to the Shah of Iran -- received support from President Carter.

In El Salvador, the Carter administration provided key military aid to a brutal regime. In Nicaragua, contrary to myth, Carter backed dictator Anastasio Somoza almost until the end of his reign. In Guatemala -- again contrary to enduring myth -- major U.S. military shipments to bloody tyrants never ended.

After moving out of the White House in early 1981, Carter developed a reputation as an ex-president with a conscience. He set about building homes for the poor. And when he traveled to hot spots abroad, news media often depicted Carter as a skillful negotiator on behalf of human rights.

But a decade after Carter left the Oval Office, scholar James Petrasassessed the ex-president's actions overseas -- and found that Carter's image as "a peace mediator, impartial electoral observer and promoter of democratic values...clashes with the experiences of several democratic Third World leaders struggling against dictatorships and pro-U.S. clients."

From Latin America to East Africa, Petras wrote, Carter functioned as "a hard-nosed defender of repressive state apparatuses, a willing consort to electoral frauds, an accomplice to U.S. Embassy efforts to abort popular democratic outcomes and a one-sided mediator."

Observing the 1990 election in the Dominican Republic, Carter ignored fraud that resulted in the paper-thin victory margin of incumbent president Joaquin Balaguer. Announcing that Balaguer's bogus win was valid, Carter used his prestige to give international legitimacy to the stolen election -- and set the stage for a rerun this past spring, when Balaguer again used fraud to win re-election.

In December 1990, Carter traveled to Haiti, where he labored to undercut Jean-Bertrand Aristide during the final days of the presidential race. According to a top Aristide aide, Carter predicted that Aristide would lose, and urged him to concede defeat. (He ended up winning 67 percent of the vote.)

Since then, Carter has developed a warm regard for Haiti's bloodthirsty armed forces. Returning from his recent mission toPort-au-Prince, Carter actually expressed doubt that the Haitian military was guilty of human rights violations.

Significantly, Carter's involvement in the mid-September negotiations came at the urging of Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras -- who phoned Carter only days before the expected U.S. invasion and asked him to play a mediator role. (Cedras had floated the idea in an Aug. 6 appearance on CNN.)

Carter needed no encouragement. All summer he had been urging the White House to let him be a mediator in dealings with Haiti.

Carter's regard for Cedras matches his evident affection for Cedras' wife. On Sept. 20, Carter told a New York Times interviewer: "Mrs. Cedras was impressive, powerful and forceful. And attractive. She was slim and very attractive."

By then, Carter was back home in Georgia. And U.S. troops in Haiti were standing by -- under the terms of the Carter-negotiated agreement -- as Haiti's police viciously attacked Haitians in the streets.

The day after American forces arrived in Haiti, President Clinton was upbeat, saying that "our troops are working with full cooperation with the Haitian military" -- the same military he had described five days earlier as "armed thugs" who have "conducted a reign of terror, executing children, raping women, killing priests."

The latest developments in Haiti haven't surprised Petras, an author and sociology professor at Binghamton University in New York. "Every time Carter intervenes, the outcomes are always heavily skewed against political forces that want change," Petras said when we reached him on Sept. 20. "In each case, he had a political agenda -- to support very conservative solutions that were compatible with elite interests."

Petras described Carter as routinely engaging in "a double discourse. One discourse is for the public, which is his moral politics, and the other is the second track that he operates on, which is a very cynical realpolitik that plays ball with very right-wing politicians and economic forces."

And now, Petras concludes, "In Haiti, Carter has used that moral image again to impose one of the worst settlements imaginable."

With much of Haiti's murderous power structure remaining in place, the results are likely to be grim.

Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon are syndicated columnists and authors of "Adventures in Medialand: Behind the News, Beyond the Pundits" (Common Courage Press).

On July 18, 1997 (the 61st anniversary of fascist Gen. Franco's coup d'etat against the democratically elected government of the Spanish Second Republic). the Institute for Global Communications (IGC) suspended the EHJ website "for review", after a virulent "e-mail bombing" attack promoted from Spain by political forces who opposed EHJ reports on the Basque resistance movement. To this date, IGC's Executive Director Marci Lockwood, mlockwood@igc.org, has not answered our request to have the website restored.

Here are the mirror sites:

http://www.freespeech.org/ehj (updated)
http://osis.ucsd.edu/~ehj
http://www.contrast.org/mirrors/ehj/

EHJ is a member of the Basque Congress for Peace (CPEH).