The secretary general of Sortu, Arnaldo Otegi, this morning spoke on the 10th anniversary of the Basque Friendship Group in the European Parliament, where he denounced the fact that “in all these years, the position of the Spanish State has not shifted a millimetre and it has been on a permanent footing of sabotage and obstruction of the scenario we have built.” For Otegi, the Spanish government maintains a “permanent refusal to become involved in solving the problems” and “continues stuck in an intellectual analysis that always looks to blame rather than find solutions; that always looks for responsibilities instead of agreements, and that always looks to impose instead of seeking political dialogue.”
From Brussels, the Sortu leader and former Batasuna spokesman said that “his main worries are about the attempt to maintain a position that no one understands nor shares in the international community and that is based on the lowest passions and resentments rather than on finding reasonable solutions to the conflicts.” For Otegi, the State “needs to keep, even artificially, exploiting the Basque conflict and myself, as an evasion strategy that allows it to hide its main deficiencies, its structural, economic, territorial problems, etc.”
Otegi also lamented that “they still believe that it is possible to recreate a scenario that belongs to the past in order to hide today’s reality,” a strategy that the Sortu leader says “will not work”, given that “it aims to recreate an anti-terrorist blueprint, as if ETA had never disappeared.” In concluding his speech, Otegi said: “I left prison with no regrets,” and he insisted that “we want to continue making a constructive contribution to today’s scenario, so that we can carry the process through to its end. We will do so in terms of conflict resolution and politics.” Finally, he said: “We will continue until we build an independent Basque State that serves the interests of our country.”
