New
Spanish PM Promises
Iraq withdrawal
By Simon Jeffery
16 March, 2004
The Guardian
José
Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose socialist party yesterday won
a sensational election victory, today vowed to pull Spanish troops out
of Iraq.
The prime minister elect used his first full media interview since last
night to affirm that he intended to follow through on what had become
a key election promise.
"The Spanish
troops in Iraq will come home," he told Cadena Ser radio.
Mr Zapatero's campaign
pledge was to keep troops in Iraq until June 30 - as Madrid had previously
pledged - and withdraw them if the US had not handed over power to the
UN by that date.
He said today that
no decision on the 1,300 Spanish troops in Iraq would be taken until
he was in power and had consulted widely, but insisted he did not intend
for them to stay. He told Cadena Ser: "The war has been a disaster
[and] the occupation continues to be a disaster. It has only generated
violence."
His Socialist party
ousted the Spanish government yesterday after voters appeared to turn
on the party of José María Aznar, the outgoing prime minister,
in the wake of last week's suspected al-Qaida attack on Madrid commuter
trains and a perceived lack of information on those responsible for
it.
The death toll from
Thursday's bombs today rose to 201 - one fewer than the October 2002
Bali nightclub attack. More than 1,000 people were wounded in the blasts.
A three-minute silence
was today held across Europe to remember the victims.
Mr Zapatero attributed
his opponent's defeat to the unpopularity of the Iraq war among Spanish
voters, saying it was the "first" consequence. "The second
will be that the Spanish troops will come back," he told the radio
station.
The prime minister
elect - who at present is attempting to form a coalition - said, however,
that his first priority was to tackle terrorism "in all its forms".
Mr Aznar's government
had blamed the armed Basque separatists Eta for the Madrid train attacks,
but suspicion is increasingly falling on al-Qaida or a similar Islamist
group.
A video of a man
purporting to be al-Qaida's military commander in Europe claiming responsibility
for the attack was discovered on the eve of yesterday's election in
a Madrid rubbish bin. Abu Dujan al-Afghani, previously unknown to western
intelligence agencies, threatened further attacks. "You love life
and we love death," he said.
Information on one
of the five people so far arrested has emerged as legal papers have
linked Jamal Zougam, 30, a Moroccan, to Imad Yarkas, who was jailed
for helping to plan the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
A 700-page indictment
by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon showed that Mr Zougam was under police
surveillance and that his home had been searched once, turning up a
video of mojahedin fighters in Dagestan, Russia, and telephone numbers
of three members of the Madrid al-Qaida cell allegedly led by Yarkas.
Concern has grown
across Europe that the bombs could mark the beginning of a terrorist
campaign across the continent. The Irish government, which holds the
rotating European Union presidency, was today considering calls from
France and Germany for high level security talks to look at what new
risks the attacks could pose to Europe.
The German interior
minister, Otto Schily, said it would "mean a new quality of threat
for all of Europe" if al-Qaida was behind the bombing.
The head of Poland's
intelligence agency, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, warned that the country
could be a possible target. "We are a United States ally and we
have a political and military presence in the Persian gulf [....] We
must take it into account that we are not only a hypothetical target
but perhaps a real one," he said today in a radio interview.
But Poland, which
commands the central zone of Iraq south of Baghdad where Spanish troops
are based, said it had no plans to withdraw. It instead offered to extend
its command if Spain would not take charge of the 24-nation division
from July 1 as planned.
The foreign secretary,
Jack Straw, denied that Britain or Spain had put themselves at risk
from revenge attacks because of their support of the war in Iraq.
"If al-Qaida
is proved to be behind the Madrid bombings there will be some who rush
to that conclusion," he told the Financial Times. "But they
will be completely wrong. One thing I am clear about is that al-Qaida
will go on and would have gone on irrespective of the war in Iraq, until
they are firmly stopped."
Mr Aznar had been
a prominent supporter of the US-led war in Iraq. A year ago this week
he attended a prewar summit with George Bush and Tony Blair in the Azores.