"Basta ya!" is an expressive slogan used by citizens protesting against the Basque separatist ETA's campaign of terror. Literally it means "That's enough now!", but its real sense is "No more!". The phrase raises a question: as the death toll from terrorism slowly but inexorably rises, how often can such a slogan be repeated and retain any meaning?
Every so often an ETA action seems so shocking that it is seized upon as a turning-point. After this, politicians say, there can be no more ambiguity among the Basques about the ETA's methods. There are massive and moving street demonstrations against terrorism. A few disenchanted ETA prisoners appear on television condemning their former comrades. Political parties pledge themselves to seamless unity in the fight for peace.
That was the story when the ETA killed 20 shoppers in an apocalyptic fireball at a Barcelona supermarket in 1987. The same things were said when the highly respected jurist, Francisco Tomas y Valiente, was shot in 1996. But it was never asserted more loudly than last July, when the ETA kidnapped a young local councillor, Miguel Angel Blanco. It killed him when the government refused to meet an impossible 48-hour deadline to bring all the ETA prisoners to jails in the Basque region.
Spain erupted in dignified fury. Images of millions of demonstrators, their upraised hands painted white in rejection of bloodshed, went around the world.
The response to Blanco's murder marked a qualitative as well as a quantitative shift in attitudes to ETA. The demonstrations were as big, relatively speaking, in ETA's heartland cities, such as Bilbao and San Sebastian, as they were in Madrid or Barcelona.
Supporters of the ETA's political coalition, Herri Batasuna, had to hide in their homes from angry crowds, reversing the usual balance of power on Basque streets. They had to postpone counter-demonstrations in support of their prisoners. It seemed that the sea in which ETA's guerrillas had long swum so freely was drying up at last.
Within weeks, however, the democratic parties were again feuding bitterly about anti-terrorist strategy. The conservative Popular Party (PP), which governs in Madrid, advocates a firm "police policy", while the moderate Basque nationalist parties periodically propose political negotiations with ETA.
The Socialist Party's involvement in scandals relating to a murderous "dirty war" against the ETA continues to poison the political atmosphere. And there has been very unseemly bickering over special security provisions for PP councillors.
Meanwhile, the kalea borroka ("street struggle"), a sort of intifada led by the youth wing of the ETA, regained its hold on Basque streets. When the ETA returned to the offensive, killing a councillor in December and another in January, the peace demonstrations, while still big, had none of the resonance of the heady days of last July.
There were signs of deep division among the ETA's political supporters, but its core social base remained intact. Last week the Bilbao clergy advised their bishop not to attend ETA victims' funerals. In so doing, they argued, he was upsetting the Basque church's favoured position of "equidistance between the two violences" in the Basque conflict. The ETA's tide may have ebbed, but its sea of support has not evaporated.
Last Friday's double murder was a double escalation of ETA's campaign against the PP. Firstly, the councillor selected, Alberto Jimenez Becerril, had no Basque connections, so that all Spanish PP politicians now seem to be targets. Secondly, the terrorists also killed his wife, Asuncion Garcia, apparently quite deliberately.
Such actions are in a very different category from the violence of the early ETA, which fought Franco's dictatorship but was generally very scrupulous in its selection of targets. On one famous occasion, conscience-stricken militants suffered terrible injuries while defusing a bomb which had inadvertently put civilian lives at risk. For the last 20 years, combating a system which everyone else recognises as democratic, the ETA's operations have become progressively more indiscriminate. The campaign against PP councillors is particularly insidious. It would appear to be aimed at provoking the conservative government into the kind of trap the Socialists fell for in the 1980s, when they certainly tolerated, and almost certainly actively promoted, the use of "death squads" against the terrorists.
The result was a consolidation of support for ETA in the Basque region and the erosion of Spanish democratic institutions. It was notable that the Spanish Prime Minister, Mr Jose Maria Aznar, speaking in Seville on Saturday, repeatedly stressed the necessity of keeping society's legitimate angry response "within the confines of the law".
Nobody has suggested that this weekend's events mark a turning point. That has been said too often. No one believes that these victims will be the last. It is arguable, however, that the ETA's armed campaign has entered its endgame. The entire leadership of Herri Batasuna was jailed for promoting terrorism last November, and has received remarkably little solidarity from other Basques.
No new leadership has yet emerged, probably because the killings of PP members have so deeply divided the ETA's political base. An architect of the ETA's 1990s strategy has recognised its "disastrous consequences", and recently called for an unconditional ceasefire.
As every chess player knows, however, a bad endgame can be fiercely destructive, and take a long time. Any return to "dirty war" tactics by the State could still return the initiative to the ETA's side of the board. It will take great skill, patience and courage if the shout of "No More!" can be uttered for the last time before 2000.
