International Peace Conference seeks end to the violence of ETA

The former Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and the Irish Minister of Norway Gro Harlem exprimera Brundtland complete the list of people at this conference, which takes place in a context of campaign for the legislative elections of November 20, in which the conservative Popular Party (PP) Partly as a heavy favorite.

Madrid. - Led by former Secretary General Kofi Annan and the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, a group of prominent international figures will look on Monday at an International Conference for Peace in the Basque country to more than 40 years of violence ETA in Spain.

The presence in San Sebastián de Annan, Nobel Peace Prize 2001, with figures like Adams or former French Interior Minister Pierre Joxe should give a boost to the meeting, organized by the National Association Lokarri and the International Contact Group of the lawyer South African Brian Currin, told AFP.

Joxe was responsible for numerous arrests of ETA members in France during the tenure of President François Mitterrand.

The former Prime Minister Tony Blair, originally appeared in the list of participants, apologized on Saturday, citing commitments in the Middle East Quartet envoy where it is formed by the United Nations Organization, United States, European Union and Russia.

Blair is however represented by his former chief of staff Jonathan Powell, who was the British government's chief negotiator in the peace process with the IRA in Northern Ireland.

The former Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and the Irish Minister of Norway Gro Harlem exprimera Brundtland complete the list of people at this conference, which takes place in a context of campaign for the legislative elections of November 20, in which the conservative Popular Party (PP) Partly as a heavy favorite.

Aimed at achieving a situation of "normalization" in the Basque Country "in the absence of violence," said one of its promoters, Silvia Casale, the conference comes at a time when ETA and its environment multiply the ads.

Two weeks ago, the armed Basque separatist organization pledged to cooperate with an international commission of verification of the ceasefire, while illegal radical organization Ekin, considered the political structure of ETA, announced its dissolution.

A week before more than 700 prisoners joined the armed organization an agreement which calls for a definitive end to the armed struggle.

Considered a terrorist organization by the European Union and the United States, ETA is responsible for the deaths of 829 people in more than 40 years of attacks by the Basque independence.

Severely weakened by the blows police, has since August 2009 without making attacks on Spanish soil. On January 10 announced a permanent ceasefire, comprehensive and verifiable by the international community, however, has not mentioned so far a possible delivery of weapons or dissolution.

That is precisely the step that many would give ETA following the conference.

"What has to happen for peace is that ETA says he abandoned weapons," he told reporters the Spanish socialist government spokesman Jose Blanco.

For the former mayor of San Sebastian, also a Socialist Odon Elorza, this conference is "a necessary sequence in the process to draw us to the end of a weakened ETA".

Elorza warned however, on his blog and facebook, that "if someone works for peace advancing thinking only of (the election) the 20-N may be wrong" because the resolution of the Basque conflict "will take time. "

Also participating in the meeting of representatives of all Basque political parties unless the RFP and Progress and Democracy Union (UPyD, centrist), which act branded propaganda meeting for electoral purposes.

Deputy Secretary of Communications of the PP, Esteban Gonzalez Pons, desacretidó Sunday "foreigners who come to a peace conference in the Basque Country are thought in Ireland or South Africa."

"I really have no fucking idea what country are or what type of conflict has lived," said Pons told reporters in Valencia.