The presentation of the book Los ojos del otro. Encuentros restaurativos entre v\u00edctimas y ex miembros de ETA took place at the Palau Robert on Wednesday, February 19.
\nThe book describes the meetings that took place in 2011 and 2012 between people who had experienced the direct violence of ETA (either directly as victims or as relatives) and people who had perpetrated acts of violence and are serving time in prison.
\nOver a hundred people attended the event, organized by ICIP. Among the participants were Maixabel Lasa, ETA victim and one of the participants in the restorative meetings described in the book; Eduardo Santos, mediator in the meetings; Esther Pascual, book and mediation team coordinator; Txema Urkijo, advisor to the Victims of Terrorism Office of the Basque Government; and Rafael Grasa, president of ICIP.
\nThe meetings celebrated between victims and ex-members of ETA \u2013 prisoners who have distanced themselves from the organization and have condemned violence \u2013 originated as a desire of some of the inmates of the Nanclares de Oca (Araba\/\u00c1lava) prison to approach their victims, as part of their internal process to separate themselves from the use of violence. The positive response to the initiative by the victims, and the good working relationship between the Victims of Terrorism Office of the Basque Government and the Department of Penal Institutions, allowed for the meetings to take place, according to Urkijo. A total of fourteen meetings between victims and perpetrators took place between 2011 and 2012, and they were all successful.
\nThe role of mediator
\nThe meetings, during which participants were able to freely express themselves, lasted between two and four hours, and were meticulously prepared by a mediation team coordinated by Esther Pascual. The mediator\u2019s job is to transmit trust so that the participants can feel at ease, and the limitations are basic, according to mediator Eduardo Santos: \u201cmutual respect, an attitude of dialogue and an encounter that does not produce more harm than the harm caused previously.\u201d
\nEsther Pascual explained that the restorative meetings \u201chave provided a response to the needs of the victims \u2013 a response they didn\u2019t have during the criminal proceedings \u2013 to eliminate hatred, to listen to the harm caused and to recognize the value of forgiveness.\u201d And, according to Pascual, \u201can ethical responsibility and the need to highlight the existence of dialogue and the significance of restorative justice\u201d made it necessary to publish the content of these experiences.
\nThe testimony of Maixabel Lasa
\nMaixabel Lasa, widow of Juan Mar\u00eda J\u00e1uregui (ex- Socialist prefect of Gipuzkoa\/Guip\u00fazcoa, assassinated by ETA in 2000) is one of the victims who participated in these meetings. On May 26, 2011, she sat next to Luis Mar\u00eda Carrasco, the person who killed her husband, in the Nanclares de Oca prison. She describes the experience of this meeting in the book Los ojos del otro, and she also gave her testimony in the event celebrated in Barcelona on Wednesday.\u201cI went to the meeting because I\u2019ve always defended, and I continue to defend, that everyone has the right to a second chance,\u201d she said. And she added, \u201cI shook his hand. I was calm, but Luis was quite nervous, and ashamed. And the first thing I asked him was if he knew my husband. He made it clear that he received orders and followed them. He had very low self-esteem and kept on saying that everything he had was bad. And I told him that if we were there, he must have something good.\u201d
\nMaixabel Lasa said that she participated in the meeting with absolute freedom, she left with a feeling of \u201cinner peace,\u201d and she demands respect for having taken this step, aware that some victims of terrorism have declared their opposition to this initiative.
\nThe program of restorative meetings has been at a standstill since the People\u2019s Party took over the Spanish government. According to Txema Urkijo, \u201cthere hasn\u2019t been an outright refusal to celebrate the meetings, but the increasing amount of obstacles and difficulties has led the initiative to a dead end, because Penal Institutions does not believe in rehabilitation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summary of the launch event for the book ‘Los ojos del otro’, a compilation of conversations between ex-members and victims of ETA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7419,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sense-categoria"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n