A controversial Basque Web journal that was virtually shut down after a deluge of protest spams has resurfaced on an activist Web site in England.
The Euskal Herria Journal is edited in New York and supports the independence of the mountainous Basque provinces of northern Spain and southwestern France. It seeks to publish information about a terrorist group called Fatherland and Liberty, or the ETA, but was removed from its original site last month after its service provider was overwhelmed by a barrage of protest spams and mailbombs, mostly originating from Spain.
At the time, the Institute for Global Communications, an ISP in San Francisco that hosts nonprofit Web sites, said that the emails were disrupting traffic to other sites and crippling its servers.
The protests hit IGC after members of the ETA assassinated a popular town councilor in northern Spain. Back in Spain, where the ETA for decades has agitated for Basque independence via bombings and other terrorist activities, protesters mounted a series of flesh-and-blood demonstrations, including one in Madrid that drew more than a million people.
Online protesters maintain that the Euskal Herria site promoted terrorism. But the journal maintains that its aim is simply to publish "information often ignored by the international media, and to build communication bridges for a better understanding of the conflict."
It's a claim that proprietors of several mirror sites support. Chris Ellsion, a spokesman for the Internet Freedom Campaign, the English group hosting the newest mirror of the Basque site, said the Net is the perfect place for controversial information to appear.
So far, Ellison has not received any mailbombs or protest emails, but he said that the site has only been up since early this week. He added that the campaign hoped that by setting up a bulletin board, readers would air their opinions in a public forum instead of spamming the webmaster.
"Internet Freedom believes the Net should provide an opportunity to read about and discuss controversial issues," Ellison said. "[We are] quite prepared to allow Net users to judge things for themselves."
