Separatist chief sorry for deaths
PARIS — A Paris appeals court postponed Monday the first of two backtoback terrorism trials this week against the last known chief of ETA, the nowdefunct Basque separatist militant group, charges that the defendant deems “absurd” because of his role in ending a conflict that claimed some 850 lives and terrorized Spain for half a century.
Josu Urrutikoetxea led ETA during one of its bloodiest periods, when its victims included children bombed to death while sleeping in a Zaragoza police compound. In a rare interview after 17 years on the run, he offered an apology, advised other separatist movements against resorting to violence and painted himself as a changed man.
That’s a preposterous claim to those who lost loved ones to ETA’s violence. Just because he oversaw ETA’s end in 2018, they stress, that doesn’t erase his past.
Now 69, diminished by a battle with cancer and facing the prospect of life behind bars, the man widely known by his police alias Josu Ternera says he’s sorry for “irreparable damage” caused by ETA violence as it sought to build an independent state straddling the Pyrenees mountain range between Spain and France.
Asked if he would apologize to ETA victims’ families, he told the Associated Press: “Of course, ( I offer) apologies for something that we can’t repair.”
But he insisted the Basque independence movement suffered, too, from a “black hole” of cultural repression rooted in the Spanish dictatorship that ended more than four decades ago, and mainly from rogue groups within the Spanish government that in the 1980s tortured and killed nearly 30 ETA members and other militants.
Since his longawaited arrest last year, Urrutikoetxea has campaigned to shed the terrorist label and rebrand himself as a repentant, aging peacemaker.
He won conditional release in July pending trial, after lawyers argued poor health made him vulnerable to contracting the new coronavirus. He’s now staying with a friend in Paris, where he’s trying to get his first college diploma and is allowed out a few hours a day with an electronic bracelet.
Urrutikoetxea was set to face justice this week for the first time in decades, following two sentences for a total of 15 years in prison for his alleged role in attack plots in the 2000s and 2010s, respectively, that he appealed when he was arrested.
But the judge on the earlier case postponed the trial to Feb. 22 because some of the key defense witnesses couldn’t make it to Monday’s hearing due to the coronavirus pandemic.