The Basque Prisoners’ Support Committee was formed in Montreal after their arrest and has fought for their release. So far the group has prevented their extradition.

The case of Perea and Plagaro is but one example of the Canadian government’s attacks on immigrants seeking refugee status in Canada, which have accelerated the last two years.

On April 23 the Canadian Minister of Justice was supposed to rule on the case, but the decision was postponed, as has happened in the past, until June 30.

Veronique Gauthier, spokesperson for the Basque Prisoners’ Support Committee stated that the group would continue the fight to free Perea and Plagaro. “We are discussing how to mark the second anniversary of their arrest with an action on June 6,” she said in an interview.

Gauthier also stated that her organization plans to take advantage of the election of Daniel Turp in the April 14 Quebec provincial ballot for the Parti Quebecois. Turp supports the campaign to free Perea and Plagaro. He is a former federal member of parliament and a professor at the University of Montreal who has visited the Basque country. Meanwhile the committee is continuing to distribute information on the case every Tuesday at the Mont-Royal subway station here.

Basques are an oppressed nationality mostly in northern Spain, and southeastern France. They have fought for independence from Spain and France for three decades. Since the death in the 1970s of Gen. Francisco Franco, Spain’s fascist dictator, the Basque people have won some autonomy—including a bourgeois nationalist-run government in charge of “security” in the region—but not full self-determination. Nearly 600 Basque political prisoners are scattered around France and Spain. Madrid has long refused to move Basque political prisoners to the Basque region and end the policy of dispersing prisoners across the country.

Perea gave an interview to the Militant recently from the Rivière-des-Prairies Detention Center in Montreal, where he and Plagaro are being held.  
 
Interview with Perea
“I grew up in a nationalist milieu and my father was a union militant,” said Perea. He became politically active at the age of 14 or 15 especially in defense of the Basque language and the rights of Basques. He was a representative of the group Euskaleria Euskaraz (Basque language in the Basque country).

“The Spanish government, with the complicity of the judicial system, is trying to adopt laws against freedom of expression and the right of association, laws that criminalize social groups,” Perea said. “For example, in the last five years newspapers and radio stations have been closed. Several human rights organizations have been criminalized and the leaders jailed. Last year the party Herri Batasuna, which is for the independence of the Basque country, was banned, which left 300,000 people without a political choice.” Perea noted that the government is intensifying repression against Basque nationalists, including a plan to lengthen the terms of political prisoners up to life in prison, a sentence that does not exist at the moment. On February 21, Pereas said, the newspaper Egunkaria, the only one published entirely in the Basque language, was shut down and its editors were jailed and tortured.

On April 26, 1993, the Spanish police arrested some 35 people, including Perea and Plagaro, using the excuse of an investigation into criminal fires that had been set the year before. “Once we arrived at the police station we were searched, then I was surrounded by a half dozen police officers who tried to intimidate me,” Perea said. “I was hit, threatened and then the interrogation started. It lasted for three days. The police used all sorts of violence to get me to admit to the crime. They held my head in a bathtub and pulled it out just in time to prevent my drowning, they struck me in the testicles, in the face, all over my body. In the case of my friend Eduardo, they put a motorcycle helmet on his head and then they beat it with a baseball bat.”

After three days of “interrogation,” Perea and Plagaro finally signed declarations recognizing their guilt. They were then released on bail, in Plagaro’s case after three months in prison.  
 
Flight to Quebec
In 1997, after appealing their convictions, Perea and Plagaro decided to flee Spain. “We came to Quebec because it is a place where the national demands are similar to ours,” Perea told the Militant. Upon their arrival here they immediately requested refugee status.

The Quebecois, the French-speaking majority of the province of Quebec, constitute an oppressed nation in Canada who have faced systematic discrimination on the basis of their language. Through several decades of battles against discrimination and for workers rights, Quebecois have succeeded in combating many aspects of their unequal status. There is wide support among people here for independence of Quebec (see link to news article below.)

Perea described how he was arrested in Canada at 6 a.m. on June 6, 2001, after the Spanish government requested extradition. “The RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] tactical squad, armed with submachine guns, broke down the door of the apartment where I lived with my companion,” he said. Plagaro was arrested at the same time, over 100 kilometers away.

Many of those held in the section of the immigration prison with Perea and Plagaro are accused of violent crimes. After Sept. 11, 2001, the two Basque nationalists, Perea said, witnessed the incarceration of “dozens of Arabs and Muslims, some of whom had no idea why they had been arrested, following the adoption of the ‘anti-terrorist’ laws by the Canadian government.”

Law C-36 was adopted by Ottawa in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in the United States under the guise of combating “terrorism.” It allows “preventive” arrests, detentions for up to 72 hours without charges being filed, and denial of the right of the defendants to remain silent and to have access to all evidence against them.

“You have to demonstrate in the streets,” Perea said in explaining what can be done to support his and Plagaro’s fight for justice. “We don’t have access to the parliament, so the street is the only place where we can demand our rights.”

Those who wish to support Perea and Plagaro’s fight to be freed from jail and oppose their extradition to Spain can contact the Support Committee at solidarite_gorka_eduardo@hotmail.com. The group encourages supporters to send letters to that effect to Canadian Minister of Justice Martin Cauchon at the East Memorial Building, 284 Wellington St., Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0H8 to demand the end to the extradition procedures. Those who are in Montreal can join the leafleting at the Mont-Royal subway station every Tuesday between 6 and 7 p.m.

Yannick Duguay is a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers and was a candidate for the Communist League in the riding of Viau during the recent Quebec provincial election. He is also a member of the Young Socialists. Grant Hargrave is a member of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees.  
 
 
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