When last Tuesday, Josu Urrutikoetxea,
Josu Ternera
, declared before the French court that judges him that in 2006 he was expelled from ETA for disagreeing with the official line, he followed a defense strategy against the accusation of belonging to a terrorist organization between 2011 and 2013. But his words, apparently surprising, also they were plausible. Josu Ternera, the living symbol of the history of ETA terrorism, bet in 2004, with an ETA greatly weakened by police and judicial action, for an end to dialogue between terrorism with the Government. He led the delegation that met with the Executive of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in Switzerland and Norway, supported by the Henri Dunant Humanitarian Dialogue Center, until in September 2006, Javier López Peña Thierry, head of the ETA political apparatus, displaced him and assumed the direction of the dialogue process to break it.
Josu Ternera withdrew to his home in Durban-sur-Ariege, in the French Pyrenees, where he was claimed again in 2011, just when ETA declared the end of terrorism, to join the ETA delegation that planned to meet with the new Government of Mariano Rajoy in Oslo (Norway) in order to negotiate his disarmament and the situation of his prisoners. The Abertzale left, led by Arnaldo Otegi, had taken control of the remains of ETA, had imposed the cessation of terrorism and wanted to recover the symbolic figure of Veal to close an agreement with the Government that did not occur due to the absence of the Executive of Rajoy. In February 2013, the government succeeded in getting Norway to expel Veal, who returned to her French refuge.
He would not reappear until May 2018, when he was commissioned to voice the ETA dissolution manifesto. Ternera made it clear that the gang was dissolving, but without self-criticism due to a history of 854 murders, 93% of them committed to the death of the dictator, a destabilizing factor for the incipient Spanish democracy. Veal tried to find a pathetic justification by saying that they had achieved the survival of Euskadi and the introduction of the right to self-determination on the political agenda, when the reality is that ETA was defeated militarily without achieving its proclaimed goals: neither the aforementioned right nor the union of Navarra and Euskadi.
Josu Ternera's biography is identified with that of ETA. He entered at the age of 20 and participated in the attack against Carrero Blanco with the theft of the dynamite that blew up the car of the President of the Francoist Government. It belonged to the military apparatus until in 1977 it took responsibility for the international area and opened ETA to revolutionary movements, especially Latin America. In 1984 he became the political head of ETA and in 1987, after the accidental death of Txomin Iturbe and the deportation of Antxon Etxebeste, he was considered the top head of ETA in a particularly bloody stage due to the use of car bombs, with the attacks of the Hipercor of Barcelona and of the headquarters of the Civil Guard of Zaragoza. That past haunts him.
In 1989 he was imprisoned in France and transferred to Spain in 1996. In October 1998 he was elected as a member of parliament in the elections to the Basque Parliament from the Euskal Herritarrok list and in 2000 the Supreme Court closed his cases because they were already tried in France.
But in 2002 he fled Spain when justice opened a new process.
He was arrested on French territory in 2019, one year after the dissolution of ETA.
As ETA's political chief, he defended terrorist orthodoxy and prevented internal criticism.
When in 1987, after the Hipercor massacre, Txomin Ziluaga, leader of the leftist nationalist HASI party, tried to subordinate ETA to that political organization, he expelled him with his followers.
Curiously, 20 years later, Ternera would be expelled by ultra-defenders of terrorism such as Thierry.
Veal, currently residing in a convent in Paris, has two pending court cases in France and another two in Spain. It may not take long for them to be settled, as has happened to other ETA leaders in the case of his predecessor, Antxon Etxebeste, and his successor, Mikel Antza. But, as Joseba Urrusolo, promoter of the Nanclares reintegration road and a member of the Madrid command at the time of Ternera as head of ETA, usually comments, the main cause before society is pending: the recognition that the terrorism was unjustifiable and unjust . Necessary to avoid repetition.
