Thanks for your recent posts too, very interesting and well written...keep them coming!!

Half the population is under the age of 18. Tanzania's future is NOW...join the 50% campaign!

ETA is an organization that is slowly dying in its blantant militancy, but there still is a large pool of support for Batasuna (Herri Batasuna, AuB, PCTV-EHAK, the poltical wing has been banned many times and reformed with a new name, the last example of this being the Basque regional elections this year where a party called PCTV-EHAK(Communist party of the Basque Country, not an affiiate of the Spanish communist party or the left coalltion IU (United left).  In 2002 or 2003 the gov't of then PM Aznar (officially the judicial magistrate Baltazar Garzon, famous for indicting Pinochet, but Aznar played the ETA card many, many times, the last time being the bullshit attempt to tie the March 11 attacks to ETA.)  

The Basque premier Ibbaretxe (Ibarreche in Spanish) refused to unseat Batasuna members from the basque parliament.  This is the normal order of things in Spain, in many ways the Basque country is a highly autonomous area, and event the plan put out by Ibarratxe for effective independence never relinquihed the relationship with Spain.  Where the basque country ever to become an independet state, hundred of thousands of Spanish of non-Basque descent would likely seek to repatriate to Spain proper. It would be a god awful mess, and polls earlier this year during the basque elections showed that 54% of Spanish favored the military occupation of the Basque country were there to be an independence referendum called.  

Also, there's a deep suspicion on the spanish right that the socialist are in with ETA because Zapatero's poltical ally Carof Rovira of the Catalan Republican left party met with ETA representatives in early 2004 before the March 14 elections in Perpingan, France (ETA depended for many years on the blind eye of the French gov't while using the Bayonne area as a base of operations for attacks in Spain. This has changed, about a year back French police found 1000 kilos of high explosive hidden by ETA in Biarriatz.)  Before the attacks this was the big story.    Shortly after the meeting ETA declared a truce in Catalunya and solidarity with Catalan aspirations.

I sincerely hope that Zapatero is wokring to coax the vast majority of ETA sympthizers  out with a poltical path to peace, and will take on the truly asinine decsion to ban Batasuna.  ETA thrives on the idea that they are an oppressed people (they see themselves as a national liberation struggle, and are nominally a marxist organization) and that because they have been denied the ballot they must embrace the bullet as a means of change.  By providing a political outlet for Basque aspirations the rhetoric of national liberation and the justification for armed struggle are deflated.  The problem is that a large part of the spanish public and the spanish right in particular is unwilling to accept the possiblitty that if given the choice the Basque country would probably choose independence by the slimmest of margins.  If the Spanish right had its way not only would ETA be banned , Carod Rovira, Zapatero's catalan left ally, would be sent to the "gas chamber" (this being a direct quote from on of the banners carried during demonstrations in Madrid directed against the possiblity of a basque independence referendum.)
 

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg