Egyptian- Spanish documentary director Basel Ramses has slammed a columnist for indirectly suggesting that the Egyptian government should observe how the Spanish government dealt with the separatist movement ETA and covertly assassinate Muslim Brotherhood leaders.
On his Facebook page, Ramses posted that Al-Masry Al-Youm columnist Assem Hanafy was “spreading lies and delusions about the way the Spanish forced ETA to cease its operations.”
In his article “Start with the Brotherhood”, Hanafy suggested that terrorist operations targeting civilians and the security sector aim at pressuring the Egyptian government to negotiate with and release detained Brotherhood leaders.
He encouraged the government to take after the Spanish government’s scheme of assassinating ETA leaders in retaliation for the group’s violent operations.
“Facing ETA separatists, who practiced bloody violence and terrorized society for years, the government there (in Spain) came up with a genius solution. Every time the separatist organization killed a member of the police, for example, the response was to assassinate one of ETA’s political leaders,” Hanafy wrote, referring to the organization that fought the Madrid government for the independence of the Basque region.
“He is even lying in the information he is citing,” Ramses responded, commenting on the article. “GAL, the Spanish terrorist security organization operated between 1984 and 1987. Its operations prompted ETA to be more active, to the extent that the 1990s were the bloodiest,” he said, referring to the Antiterrorist Liberation groups illegally established by some government officials to fight ETA.
Ramses added that the ETA halted its operations in November 2011, 25 years after GAL came to an end, which, he said, meant that GAL’s activities were not behind ETA’s renunciation of violence.
“The scandal resulted in the prosecution of many politicians who, although aware of its (GAL) existence, failed to ban it. The Spanish society punished the terrorist [GAL, in this case] officers,” Ramses argued.
