The Basque separatist group Eta disbanded in 2018, having laid down its weapons seven years earlier, following a four-decade campaign of violence that killed more than 800 people.
Niall Cullen’s book provides a dispassionate perspective, examining Eta and its impact until the mid-1990s from the point of view of British diplomacy. The result is an account of the Basque organisation’s early years and growth into a significant threat for the Spanish security forces, something which has been told many times before, but this time in the context of Spanish-UK relations and analyses of British officials at the time.
Cullen recounts how quickly the view of Eta transformed between 1961, when an early attack was described by one diplomat as “a somewhat infantile attempt to derail a train”, and 1968, by which time the group had claimed its first victims and become “a serious headache for the local authorities”.
It was a headache that occasionally drew in other countries, particularly during the social and political turmoil that accompanied the last years of the regime of Francisco Franco. Death sentences issued to six Eta members in 1970, for example, drew international condemnation. Yet, as the UK joined those lobbying against the sentences, the defensiveness of the Spanish regime was a concern for London, as was the possibility that Franco might draw what was described in one diplomatic memo as “a misleading parallel” between the Basque situation and Northern Ireland.
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Eta’s relationship with the IRA would become an ongoing concern for the British authorities, who provided their Spanish counterparts with anti-terror logistical advice.
As London walked this tightrope, it was also wary of antagonising Madrid regarding Gibraltar, which is regarded by Spain as a British colony.
By the mid-1980s, Spain’s response to Eta had entered what one British official described as a “new and terrible phase” with the creation of the GAL death squads, which would sully the legacy of then socialist prime minister Felipe González.
Nearly a decade on from its disbandment, Eta is still capable of fuelling fierce, at times hysterical, debate in Spain as some politicians warn, erroneously, of its lingering influence. This diplomats’ view is a welcome antidote to such cynicism.
- Guy Hedgecoe reports on Spain for The Irish Times
