Political persecution against Basques continues

20 Basque citizens were sentenced to prison penalties between 15 months and three years in yet another imperialist mock trial, another expression of the colonialist power exerted by Castile-Spain on the Southern Basque Country.

The Audiencia Nacional political court (alias the Inquisition), created by Franco in order to persecute political dissidents and protect the regime's brutality and corruption, decreed with no evidence other than totally biased police reports that the political parties and coalitions People's Unity (HB), We Basque Citizens (EH) and Unity (Batasuna) were mere tools of the Basque guerrilla ETA and that the social centers known as People's Taverns (Herriko Tabernak in Basque) were financial tools of ETA (without any detail of how that could be, particularly considering that ETA had its own revolutionary tax financing system). 

In the detail of the sentences to each of the accused, the evidence comes to be something like lack of express condemnation of ETA merely being member of one of the above mentioned parties. In other words: they are being declared guilty by their opinions and political activity.

In the case of Rufi Etxeberria he is being sentenced (also) for declining to help with a revolutionary tax payment in 1993. He was contacted by Joseba Egibar (a prominent EAJ-PNV leader) to do so and it has been clearly established that he flatly rejected the proposition.

Only one of the judges, Clara Bayarri, issued a dissident vote claiming that all the accused should be acquitted. 

Beside the prison penalties, 111 People's Taverns are to be confiscated by the state. 

The trial has lasted for 12 years, beginning in 2003 when the Inquisition declared the three parties (roughly successor of each other) illegal. The defense will appeal to the Supreme Court, what leaves the sentence suspended by the moment. 

What is clear from the continued political repression against Basques, even now that ETA is knee-deep in a unilateral process of disarmament, is that for Castile-Spain it does not matter if the struggle for Basque freedom is performed by violent or peaceful means, the only thing that matters to them is that we do not bow to the imperialist imposition.

Source: Gara[es].