After coming to power in June a month after
ETA disbanded, Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez pledged to
start reversing an official policy of keeping them scattered across
Spain, hundreds of kilometres away from home.

But the conservatives and some of the
relatives of the estimated 853 ETA victims fiercely resist this, arguing
prisoners should first repudiate the group before they can be allowed
closer, which few have done.

Prisoner relatives retort that now
ETA is gone, moving them to the Basque Country would help their gradual
reintegration in a society where a majority of people and parties are in
favour anyway.

And so the dilemma continues.

Just 19 transfers

“We think it’s possible to bring all prisoners
to Zaballa (Basque jail) and that they start reintegration processes
there,” says Teresa Toda of the Social Forum, a group campaigning on
behalf on the prisoners.

Currently, 265 people are in prison over their
links to ETA, 46 of whom are in France and one in Portugal, says Urtzi
Errazkin of Etxerat, an association of prisoner families.

The rest are in Spain with very few in the Basque Country, he adds.

Since Sanchez’s announcement, 19 have
been or are in the process of being transferred closer to home, a
spokeswoman for Spain’s prison authority told AFP.

But only two were sent to the Basque Country
after repudiating ETA as part of a government-led reintegration process
already in place.

Not good enough, says Toda, who herself spent six years in jail.

Deputy-director of Egin, a pro-independence
Basque newspaper that was closed down in 1998, she was accused of
collaborating with ETA, which she denies.

Kept under the most severe “first degree”
regime — like a vast majority of ETA prisoners — she was only allowed
out of her cell four hours a day.

And the victims?

Spanish law recommends that authorities avoid
“socially uprooting convicts” but authorities implemented the policy of
keeping ETA prisoners far from home to try to weaken the organisation.

That
forces many relatives to travel hundreds of kilometres — at times
every week — to see them, with all the cost and potential road
accidents that implies, says Errazkin.

“They’re using the suffering of relatives to take revenge on the prisoners,” he tells AFP.

And the victims?, retorts Consuelo Ordonez, head of the Covite victims’ association.

“I have to travel 1,200 kilometres every time I
want to go see my brother in his grave” in the Basque resort of San
Sebastian, she says angrily.

Her brother Gregorio, a Basque lawmaker, was
killed by ETA in 1995 and she herself was so threatened that she was
forced to leave the region.

Her association is against transferring
prisoners to the Basque Country if they haven’t first repudiated ETA and
apologised to victims, which few have done.

Especially given that Madrid has said it is
open to giving the Basque regional government, which already has
autonomy in a wide range of areas, control over prison management.

Ordonez fears the nationalists may be too lenient towards prisoners in the Basque Country.

Basque society in favour

But much of Basque society is in favour of bringing them closer, activists and opinion polls show.

Many acknowledge that ETA wreaked death and
destruction but that there were also victims on the other side from
anti-ETA death squads, far-right groups or police, accused of torture.

“Much of what we see is ‘I don’t care where they serve their sentence as long as justice is done’,” says Toda.

In its biannual poll published in December,
the Basque Deusto University found that 34 percent of those surveyed
were in favour of bringing ETA prisoners closer compared to just seven
percent for dispersion.

A further 29 percent were for granting amnesty to all or some of them.

For Ordonez, that hurts.

“That’s the society that applauded when ETA killed us, justified it, passed on information or looked the other way,” she says.