The starting point was the linguistic objective that has historically been imposed by the Abertzale Left, that is, the creation of an Basque Basque Basque Country made up of multilingual Basque citizens. Or, in other words, to build a Basque State that guarantees the Castilian speaking people their personal linguistic rights, operating primarily in Basque. Therein lies the linguistic objective of the independence process: to carry out the linguistic transition. We have to move from Castilian to Euskera, as we have to move from fossil energies to clean energies. Therefore, it is a change of model, and not of the optimization or potentiality of the current model.

These were, among others, the four main ideas that appeared in Durango.

First. The Basque language is important for the independence process because the language – the Basque language – establishes a territory – the Basque Country – to the independence process. On the other hand, because Euskera is one of the fundamental pillars of the Basque citizenship that we are going to create, as do the rest of the states of the world. And finally, because it is the Basque who wants to make the State Basque.

Second. The Basque State will not in itself guarantee the normalization of the Basque Country, because our starting point is that of the minority language. But we also stress that without the Basque State, the Basque Country will not be able to normalise. The Irish model clearly shows that being a state does not imply linguistic normalisation. The State is an indispensable instrument, but not sufficient. In Ireland, language normalization was abandoned to the post-state political phase and the independence process was developed in English. Today, a hundred years later, in the Irish Free State, Gaelic is declining, in Northern Ireland, but in a worse situation. The same has happened in the decolonizing independence processes that have rejected their original language. The language of the occupant that he colonized has become the main language of the new independent state, as well as the eye of the chain with the old metropolises, as Calvet explains in his book “Linguistics and Colonialism”. Thus, in the Basque State, which will operate mainly in Spanish, the Basques will not be free.

Third. The Basque will give everyone who wants to be Basque, both here and abroad, the main road to integration in the Basque Country. The Basque State will not impose on anyone living on its territory Basque nationality or identity. Everyone will have the individual right to maintain their own, but the Basque State will offer all residents the possibility of appropriating Basque nationality, giving the Basque community and culture of the language, the Basque language, all the means to learn for free.

And the fourth. Euskera, together with socialism and feminism, is one of the components of the DNA of the Basque State that we are going to create. And if the independence process gets stronger, it will be because those three pillars will feedback each other. The Basque State project will be attractive, because we will agree with all kinds of oppressed independence processes, as we have demonstrated in Peralta.

These reflections made in Durango are not today, although we express them in a new way. We met Argala in Hendaia, when he was learning Basque at the barnetegi organized for the refugees. The historical leader of ETA realized that he was an incomplete Basque without knowing Euskera and, with the intention of making him all Euskaldun, he started studying Euskera. An example in that too, Argala. In the same vein, when Joselu Cereceda, a former LAB and HASI senior leader, went to the streets after studying Euskera in prison, said that the doors of a whole world, that of the Basque community, which he did not know, were opened. Cereceda died becoming a furious user of the Basque Country. As Sarrionaindia said, “the Basque is our only free territory” or, in the words of Txillardegi, “the Basque is the homeland of the Basques”.

For all these reasons, the Basque country must be one of the main characteristics and pillars of the independence process, if we want to build an Euskal Herria Euskaldun, socialist, feminist and free.

* Joseba Alvarez, member of Sortu