Thousands protest in Spain after ETA bomb
Source: Reuters
(Adds official estimate of numbers, paragraph 6) By Joe Ortiz MADRID, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards marched through major cities for peace on Saturday, two weeks after the Basque separatist group ETA shattered its nine-month "permanent ceasefire" with a massive car bomb. But bickering over slogans and government policy on ETA led the main opposition Popular Party to boycott the march in Madrid, the first time a major party has not attended an anti-ETA protest since democracy returned to Spain in the 1970s. Similar squabbles also prompted other groups to stay away from the demonstrations, which came after ETA claimed responsibility for the bomb that killed two people at Madrid's Barajas airport. The conservative Popular Party had said it would only join the Madrid march if its slogan contained the word "liberty". When this was inserted by the organisers, the party decided not to join anyway and demanded that the marches in the capital and the northern city of Bilbao be called off, accusing the government of having no realistic anti-terrorism policy. The Madrid march finally got under way under the slogan "For peace, life and liberty and against terrorism". Madrid's regional government estimated attendance at 210,000. Batasuna, the banned political wing of ETA, refused to join the Bilbao march because the slogan there included the phrase "We demand ETA ends violence". Bilbao officials said 80,000 took to the streets of the Basque city. Since the airport blast the government of Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has broken off a peace process that many hoped would end ETA's violent campaign for a separate Basque homeland. More than 800 people have been killed in nearly four decades of violence. Earlier this week, ETA said that despite the Barajas bomb, a ceasefire declared last March remained intact. Nevertheless, it threatened further action. Since the blast, the government has been under intense pressure from the Popular Party to say what its policy on the Basque region will now be. Zapatero will appear in parliament on Monday to discuss the issue but did not attend the Madrid march, which was called by trade unions and a group representing Ecuadorian immigrants. Both victims of the latest bomb were from the Ecuador. "We came to Spain to make a life, not to lose it," one Ecuadorian man told TeleMadrid. "We came to live, not be killed by ETA." Another group, the Association of Victims against Terrorism, which has organised large anti-ETA marches in the past, also boycotted Saturday's protest because it said the march supported "negotiation with terrorists". (Additional reporting by Teresa Larraz, Elisabeth O'Leary and Ben Harding)
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