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Thousands of people supported the banned Basque political party ANV by casting a
symbolic vote on our website www.vredesprocesbaskenland.nl. A total number of
8.988 people voted for the ANV. Many of them from the Basque Country, but also
2.927 people from the rest of the world support the symbolic action. The final result
can be found at http://www.vredesprocesbaskenland.nl
The elections in Spain are over. The media speak about elections that are dominated
by terror but obviously don´t care about the fact that these same elections are far
from democratic. And that´s not because ETA thought it was necessary to carry out
an attack two days before the elections, but because the ANV - a party representing
a significant part of the Basque population - was excluded to participate by
temporary measure shortly before the elections.
The Accion Nacionalista Vasca, the ANV, dates from before the Spanish Civil War
and the following dictatorship. The ANV is a leftwing party that split off from the
rightwing Basque nationalist movement in 1930. Shoulder to shoulder with a.o. the
Spanish social democrats they fought before, during and after the Civil War against
the fascism of the Franco-regime. The small ANV was a loyal defender of the
Second Republic, in the end defeated by Franco. The party participated in the
struggle with four battalions and lost 550 members defending the Republic. In the
last years of the Republic the ANV even took part in the legitimate government and
after the victory of the fascists the ANV was active in Basque exile governments
together with the social democrats and committees for the preparation for the return
of democracy in Spain. The ANV is used to be banned, she has been illegal for 40
years. But she could never have expected that her former brothers in arms of the
Spanish Socialist Party PSOE would - more than 30 years after the death of Franco -
conspire with the inheritors of the dictator (the Partido Popular) to ban the party
again.
To protest against the banning of the ANV we organised a digital ballotbox. From
over the whole world people could cast a symbolic vote on the ANV. A total number
of 8.988 people protested through voting against the banning. These votes came from
5.796 different ip-adresses. We didn´t discover any irregularities in this. A big part of
the votes came from people in the Basque Country. These votes obviously don´t
represent the supporters of the ANV: our action was aimed for people from other
parts of the world. In the Basque Country itself the independentist movement called
for a boycot of the elections, a call we can only support taking the recent repression
into account.
The votes from the Basque Country not counted, 2.927 people showed their
solidarity with the ANV. Despite the very one-sided coverage of the Spanish-Basque
conflict in the international media, almost 3.000 people showed within a couple of
weeks their solidarity. As a whole we see our action as a huge success.
The ANV stands for a left and independent Basque Country. The ANV wants to
achieve that in a democratic way - she rejects the use of violence in her founding
documents - and demands of Spain that the political system has to be adjusted to
make this possible. In other words, the ANV demands that the Basques are allowed
to decide their political future themselves. The Basque Information Centre supports
that demand and is strongly convinced that only recognition of the right on self
determination of the Basque Country can end the conflict about the political status of
the Basque Country in a just and final way.
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