JAILED members of the Basque separatist group ETA say they launched a hunger strike Monday to protest Spain´s policy of keeping them isolated from each other.

The so-called Basque Political Prisoners Group announced the strike in a statement sent to Gara, a pro-independence Basque newspaper that often serves as a mouthpiece for ETA.

Around 750 people are serving time in Spanish or French jails over their membership in or links to ETA. Spain´s long-standing policy is to keep ETA prisoners spread out in jails around the country, usually far from their homes in the Basque region, as a way to keep them from plotting behind bars.

“We do not have to accept that any of us be isolated, kept at a distance or dispersed,' the prisoners” statement said. But Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said the government would not change its policy one bit.

ETA´s prisoners are said to be divided, with a minority of them reportedly pushing for the group to renounce violence. The Basque Political Prisoners Group said earlier this month it had expelled five members for “breaking with discipline” an apparent allusion to their calling on ETA to lay down arms.

ETA has killed more than 825 people since launching its campaign for an independent Basque homeland in the 1960s. It declared what it called an open-ended cease-fire in 2006, but returned to violence in a matter of months after peace talks with the government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero went nowhere. — AP

via Basques start hunger strike.