Protesters condemn 'appeasement' of terror group

Hundreds of thousands of chanting, flag-waving Spaniards clogged the streets of Madrid to protest over what they called the government’s policy of appeasing the Basque separatist group ETA.

Yesterday’s rally highlighted a deep social rift over ETA – a decades-old scourge many Spaniards consider their country’s worst.

Protesters demanded the resignation of prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, saying he had insulted ETA’s victims and the nation by seeking peace talks with the armed group and recently granting house arrest to a notorious ETA killer.

The conservative Popular Party organised the rally, and Madrid’s regional government, controlled by the party, estimated attendance at 2.1 million. That would make it the largest rally in Spain in years.

The Interior Ministry, however, put attendance at 342,655. Such discrepancies are common in anti-government rallies in Spain.

Popular Party leader Mariano Rajoy accused the government of yielding to terrorists on the issue that ostensibly prompted the protest – the leniency arrangement granted to hunger-striking ETA prisoner Jose Ignacio de Juana Chaos - although the anger was really aimed at Zapatero.

Rajoy decried “the stupidity of a government that let itself be coerced by a killer and has yielded”.

Protester Rogelio Casado, a 50-year-old tax consultant, said “whoever does not see that the government has yielded to terrorists is blind”.

Many of the protesters carried banners with the slogan: “Spain for freedom, no more concessions to ETA” while the crowd chanted: “Zapatero, resign” and sang the Spanish national anthem.

“I am a little bit ashamed that he is my prime minister,” said Juan Calvo, a 48-year-old computer engineer. “He lives in his own world.”

Calvo compared Zapatero to a Hugo Chavez-style populist – referring to Venezuela’s president – who rushed into a peace process with ETA without really thinking about the consequences.

De Juana Chaos, near death on a hunger strike over a new conviction stemming from newspaper articles deemed to be terrorist threats, was moved from Madrid to the Basque region on March 1 as a first step towards his serving out the remainder of his sentence under house arrest.

The new charges came just as he was about to be released after serving 18 years of a sentence of 3,129 years for killing 25 people in a string of ETA attacks. Under Spanish law, the maximum he could have served in prison was 30 years.

Conservatives were already furious with a Socialist government that wanted to negotiate with ETA and would not rule this out even after an ETA bombing in December that killed two people and ended a nine-month ceasefire ETA had said would be permanent.

The Conservatives seized on the government’s treatment of De Juana Chaos as another example of accommodating terrorists, and a string of opposition rallies held since the December 30 blast at Madrid airport have been as much about denouncing Zapatero as about ETA.

The government has said it wanted to act humanely, even if De Juana Chaos had not, and that under the law he was eligible for house arrest. This is because he had already served more than half the time in his new conviction over the newspaper articles, measured from when he was first charged in 2005.

The government has not said so outright, but it is widely seen as having acted to prevent De Juana Chaos from becoming a martyr to the Basque pro-independence by starving himself to death. That would almost certainly complicate, if not doom, any chances that might remain for salvaging the peace process that was derailed by the December bombing.

Polls often say that Spaniards view ETA, classified in Brussels and Washington as a terrorist group, as their country’s biggest problem, part of a violent threat that includes Muslim extremism. A cell loyal to al Qaida killed 191 people in the Madrid train bombings three years ago.