Luis Daniel Izpizua: I am a Basque. No one should kill in my name

Eta may again have sown terror. I weep and weep but I know that there is something more in my emotion than pity for the families, whose pain is as unimaginable as the horror visited on the victims.

I know that I am crying because something within me has broken in the core of whatever gives dignity to my own life. I have never attached great importance to the place of my birth. I have never thought about the possibility that it would shape me in one way or another.

But I now have to come to terms - in a different way than before - with the fact that I am Basque. Today I affirm it up front, even though all my impulses are to deny it. I am Basque and I give nobody - nobody - permission to commit murder in my name.

I do not accept that anybody else should proscribe my supposed rights. I will not allow my origins to be steeped in blood and buried in shame.

It is Basques who must eliminate the blight that sullies us, these slaughters which place us beyond the limits of humanity. I invoke neither anger nor vengeance, I try only to protect my dignity, to find a place free of torment.

Nobody, except Eta, is to blame for this massacre. It would be a very grave error to look for culprits outside that murderous organisation.

Neither the Government nor the political classes are to blame for what happened, and neither are we responsible for it. The fight against terror does not absolve us from committing errors but errors can be corrected. What we can never do is to accept the blame because then we are absolving the murderers. Some Basques are murderers. But they only thrive by sucking our blood. And when they spill blood we are bled dry.

We are not guilty, although we must correct whatever errors we have made for the sake of effectiveness. Somebody who is disposed to kill will find an excuse anywhere and Eta has given us many examples of this.

But we must not help it to write its script, we must not provide it with a path which can only do us more harm. Disunity helps Eta to write its script.

We must avail ourselves of all the means which the rule of law gives us to finish with Eta but we must also prevent blame attaching itself to us because this opens wounds in society and weakens it.

We shall go out into the streets in protest but even that is not enough. That unity our emotions can achieve for us must also be brought about through reason. That unity must be present in the agreed political action of every day from now on.

The writer is a journalist with 'El Pais'