From banned Basque political party Batasuna, received via e-mail, June 3:

Faced with the events which occurred in Tibet, Batasuna firstly wants to express its solidarity with the Tibetan people and begs to stop the repression against the protests made by the men and women of Tibet.

We reassert the necessity to resolve this kind of conflicts through dialogue and negotiation between the legitimate representatives of the Tibetan people and the Chinese Government, a dialogue based on the right for the Tibetan people to decide their own destiny. That is why we welcome the display of the Chinese Government in favour of dialogue.

We welcome as well the position of the European Union—under the presidency of Slovenia—in favour of dialogue and negotiation to resolve the Tibetan issue.

In that way, we appeal for the European Union to maintain that same position regarding the conflict which opposes the Spanish Government to the Basque Country, which is a much closer conflict. We consider that, according to that attitude, and in order to resolve the issue, the European Union should condemn the repression of the Spanish Government against the Basque independent movement, and promote the need to open a dialogue and negotiation process, based on the right to decide for Basque people. The EU will have poor legitimacy to attract attention from the outside on the matter if one of its members, the Spanish State, violates systematically the human rights to avoid the legitimate aspirations of Basque people whereas the Member States of the EU keep quiet.

The silence of the EU in this case, or in other ones like the recent repression of the Turkish Government against the Kurdish population, of the Moroccan Government regarding the legitimate aspirations of the Saharan people, or the situation of the Palestinian and Tamil people, just shows the geostrategic and self-serving nature of the International Community position regarding the Tibet, as it is more interested to put pressure on the Chinese Government and to destabilize it than to really defend the legitimate rights of people.

See our last posts on Tibet and the Basque struggle.