DON’T EXTRADITE THE BASQUES

www.dontextraditethebasques.org



In March 2001 Beñat was arrested by the Spanish police with another 15 young Basque pro-independence activists. After being detained incommunicado for five days, Beñat was imprisoned in Madrid. He was accused of being a member of the Basque pro-independence socialist youth organisations Jarrai and Haika.

In the year leading up to this move, there had been a huge campaign orchestrated by the Spanish government and media, falsely claiming that links existed between ETA and the youth organisations, and urging their criminalisation. As well as claiming that Jarrai-Haika [and now Segi] was a “bridge” to ETA, Judge Garzón claimed that the youth organisations were responsible for commissioning acts of street violence by young people, which he classified as “urban terrorism”. In reality Jarrai and Haika were independent public, political youth organisations involved in campaigns to promote the rights of young people, and to promote independence and socialism for the Basque Country, through organising demonstrations, summer schools, youth camps and festivals.

Basque pro-independence youth activists faced continuous harassment and repression by the Spanish government and police for their political activism, which has intensified in recent years. In one example of such harassment, Beñat was arrested with more than a hundred other students during a peaceful sit-in at the university campus protesting for the right to study their degrees in Euskara (the Basque language).

The Basque youth movement was gathering strength and established a new national youth organisation, Haika, in 2000, with more than 20,000 young people attending the group’s inaugural meeting in Kanbo. Haika set about organising several thousand young activists in campaigns around social and economic issues, for youth and students’ rights and for Basque cultural rights. Fearing the political impact of a well-organised national Basque youth movement in favour of independence, the Spanish authorities, led by Judge Baltasar Garzón, responded by stepping up its campaign of criminalisation against Jarrai and Haika.