Homage to Catalonia

Looking at the news today made us realise that we haven't been paying enough attention to Spanish politics. Spain is apparently convulsed by a statement from the violent Basque separatist group ETA that it is ceasing all terrorist activities in Catalonia. And if you're thinking...wait a minute, I didn't think the Basque country and Catalonia were the same thing...you'd be right. It's perhaps misleading but nonetheless tempting for us to try and map this situation into the familiar Irish context, and thus the hypothetical analogy would be if the IRA issued a statement announcing that they are ceasing terrorist activities in Scotland. This would arguably be read as (a) an admission that it was behind some previously unacknowledged attacks in Scotland, and (b) as an implicit threat to continue attacks in other parts of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Just to complicate things further in this hypothetical scenario, the IRA statement would conclude with greetings and salutations to the Scottish National Party.

And so it is in Spain. ETA's statement made common cause with Catalonian separatists, characterised the region as under the oppression of Spain and France, and seems to have landed one of the Catalonian governing coalition parties in the soup by bringing into the open secret meetings ETA had with them. The more excitable Madrid centrists read the ETA announcement as a stunt designed to promote a new Northern Alliance in which masked gunmen would drop their books about Miro and Picasso and jump on the next Talgo to Madrid and be done with the war of independence by dinner time. Consequently, the chief immediate beneficiary of the stunt seems to be PM Jose Maria Aznar's party, headed into a general election (albeit one that they were likely to win anyway). In short, other than getting themselves in the news, it's not clear what ETA has achieved. More research required.