When

by shamatha

Posted to Poetry and Politics on 2004-03-12 13:43:00

Parent message is 619040
I first saw ‘bombing’ and ‘Spain’ in the headlines, I immediately assumed it was ETA. I am not a Spain expert, but I do know a guy there from high school, so when I saw a Spain related headlines, I’ll read the story. Most of the stories that make the US news, of course, involve ETA bombings. But when I read the details of yesterdays attack, I wondered if it might be al Queda, because in my memory of ETA attacks, they tend to be directed against instruments of the govt. like politicians and the Guardia Civil. And I’ve read the one time that ETA did kill 21 civilians in a supermarket bombing, they issued an apology afterwards admitting it was a mistake. And the coordinated, multiple attacks seems to fit with the usual al queda M.O. And Aznar was one of the few Europeans to support Bush, I remember him being part of the conference in the Canary Islands where Bush issued his 48 hours ultimatum to Hussein. And most of Spain was ruled by Muslims for something like 700 years, but I’m not sure how or if that would play into it.

I hadn’t read the detail about the dynamite, but it seems odd for those two groups to work together; I mean, a national separatist group and anti-western global terrorists?

Again, I’m no Spanish historian. I know that the Basques have been agitating for independence for some time, and that they were horribly oppressed under Franco (Guernica was a Basque village bombed by the Nazi’s with Franco’s blessing that become the subject of the Picasso anti-war painting) but since Franco’s death, I don’t think it’s been that bad for them. It’s not a Palistinian situation, at least, I don’t think. So I don’t know why they’d feel the need to stage an attack of this magnitude, which they had to know would stir up enormous sentiment against them. (the Barcelona supermarket bombing led to demonstrations by 6 million Spaniards. This in a country of about 40 million.)

I don’t know. I think it was al queda, but I guess we will have to wait and see.