The Bizkaia employers' association, Cebek, has conveyed to the Basque Government a historic claim from some groups and has demanded “a plan to recognize and attract the people, families and companies that left” due to the threat of ETA. An initiative aimed at this purpose would serve, in Cebek's opinion, to “complete the circle” through “a return plan” that “would allow justice to be done with this important forgotten group.”
This approach has been conveyed by the president of Cebek, Carolina Pérez Toledo, to the Lehendakari, Iñigo Urkullu, within the framework of the General Assembly of the Vizcayan employers' association and on the occasion of the upcoming change in the Basque Executive.
The idea has been raised specifically by political and business groups, and insistently by the University of Deusto professor Luis Ramón Arrieta Durana.
Pérez Toledo, in fact, has used data from this economist to point out that, although “it is difficult to calculate the real data on the impact of terrorism,” “some experts speak of 24% of our GDP and between 40,000 and 150,000 people who left our country and more than 15,000 extorted businessmen.”
“Sometimes we have the impulse to turn the page as soon as possible and look to the future, forgetting the suffering. The human mind is prepared for it. But it would be unfair, and a serious error that could lead our society, and especially our young people who did not experience it, to downplay its importance and somehow, through ignorance, come to justify or be in some way 'understanding' with what happened,” he warned.
Cebek has not specified how this approach could be carried out when 13 years have passed since the end of ETA and more than two decades since the years of greatest persecution of the business community (Pérez Toledo has recalled the murder of Joxe Mari Korta in the year 2000).
In any case, the employers' association has left this task as a task for the Basque Executive that emerges from the negotiations that PNV and PSE are holding these days and that could be formed before the summer.
