This post has benn written by Jule Goikoetxea for her blog on naiz.eus and translated by Danele Sarriugarte

Dispersion, in physics, means dissolution, and it happens when a body is uniformely scattered throughout the mass of a solid, gaseous or liquid substance.

Dispersion, in politics, happens when the Spanish and French States sistematically scatter Basque political prisoners throughout their territories.

The goal of dispersion is to turn a political prisoner into an ordinary prisoner. The method used to achieve that objective consists in making the friends and relatives of prisoners travel 1200 km every week, which, moreover, costs them 1600 euros every month. Since dispersion began back in 1989, there have been over 400 traffic accidents, and 16 people have lost their lifes.

Dispersion is exile.

Basque political prisoners are condemned to live away from their home, thus increasing the isolation already created by prisons. The aim of all this is to avoid the social support towards prisoners, not just keeping the control over confinement and visit regimes away from the Basque public institutions, but also violating the prisoners’ right to counsel, given that the attorneys’ journeys become impossible to afford.

The further the prisoner is away from home, the more difficult it becomes for him/her to communicate in his/her mother tongue. The further he/she is, the stranger will the food, climate and habits feel, the weaker will the media from his/her homeplace be heard and the bigger will the lack of information become. Isolation and lack of support are the foundations of every artificially sustained exile.

Isolation as a standardized penalty was created to increase rebels’ productivity. Dispersion, on the other hand, was created to destroy rebels’ identity.

However, the goal of dispersion is not only to depoliticize prisoners, it is also attempted at wearing out and tiring the community that supports them. The objective of dispersion is to create psychological tension, physical weariness eta economic sinking among the Basque community.

It is a collective penalty, for exile is applied to the whole Basque community. Those who travel 1000 km every week and pile up a 20000 euro debt per year are elderly people, children and young kids, workers and unemployed people, supporters and opposers of the prisoners’ ideology, Basques and Andalusians, disabled people, poor people and newborn babies. The entire Basque Country pays for and endures dispersion. A weekly exile.

Dispersion is dissolution.

If the Basque Country didn’t have a policentric social structure, that is, if the Basque Country were formed by a big city and many small villages, instead of by a number of small industrialized cities, the country wouldn’t be able to cope with dispersion. Regions wouldn’t be strong enough to organize solidarity networks between the various towns and neighborhoods, citizens who do not know each other wouldn’t be able to face, all united and self-organized, this collective penalty imposed by the Spanish and French States, generation after generation. If it weren’t for the structure and mobilization capacity of Basque society, there wouldn’t be enough resources to maintain prisoners as political prisoners, and once the prisoners are depoliticized, the conflict becomes depoliticized too.

The aim of dispersion is to erase the political dimension of the Basque conflict, consequently erasing the identity of a community that is inmersed in a conflict, for it is well known that a community without an identity is a community that doesn’t exist.

The time has come to end this letal exile of the Basque community which has been going on for decades. For this purpose, it is absolutely necessary that the international community gets involved in the process and, also, that every citizen takes part in it.

For now we are all aware, here in the Basque Country as well as abroad, that dispersion is a collective penalty and that it is aimed at dissolving a political community.

This Saturday, JANUARY 10, 2015: DEMONSTRATION IN BILBAO AGAINST DISPERSION

#NowEuskalHerrira #NOWBILBORA