ANALYSIS:Basque radicals are inching towards another ceasefire but Eta intransigence and Madrid indifference are formidable obstacles, writes PADDY WOODWORTH
THE TRIAL began in Madrid this week of three young men charged with the car-bombing of Madrid airport in December 2006.
That attack, claimed by the Basque terrorist group Eta, not only took the lives of two people and wounded many more. It shattered the prospects for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in the Basque Country that had been raised by Eta’s ceasefire nine months earlier.
The 2006 peace process was born limping, however. The conservative Partido Popular (PP), then as now in opposition, denounced it from the outset in the most vehement terms. And the prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, repeatedly failed to clarify the real intentions of the Socialist party (PSOE) in negotiations. But what scuppered it completely was Eta’s imposition of an increasingly radical agenda on its political allies, who had initially seemed prepared to make Sinn Féin-style compromises.
The bombing merely confirmed what those involved in the talks already knew: Eta was not serious about engaging with democracy. Since the 1960s, every attempt to bring Eta into the political arena has resulted in a split. A hard core of activists has always been able to retain enough popular support to continue their “armed struggle”.
Whenever there is a debate between the pistol and politics in Eta, many Basques say, the pistol always wins. But the pistol has lost much of its power in 21st-century Basque Country. Both the rise of Islamist terror and the dissolution of the IRA have made the organisation seem like an anachronism to many of its former supporters. And the major Spanish parties, aided by a highly politicised judiciary, succeeded in banning Eta’s once-powerful associates in Batasuna in 2002. Most of Batasuna’s former leadership are now in jail on charges, some very weakly based, of supporting or belonging to Eta.
Partly as a result of this systematic exclusion of the most radical Basque nationalists from elections, the moderates of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) have been ousted from the Basque autonomous government for the first time, by the PSOE. That was just a year ago and, despite dire predictions to the contrary, life has gone on pretty normally in the region since then.
Indeed, Eta itself has been critically weakened by vigorous police operations over the last three years, sometimes losing three leaders in as many months. With the exception of bombings and shootings last July, it seems incapable of emulating its grimly effective terror campaigns of the 1980s or 1990s.
In a carefully choreographed series of statements, Basque radical leaders have inched towards openly calling for an end to violence over the last few months. But they still speak in a kind of code, laced with a jaded 1960s rhetoric. “We have said that a strategy of confrontation now objectively favours the state,” one of the few influential radical figures still out of jail told The Irish Times yesterday, though he declined to be named. That seems to mean Eta is now more a hindrance than a help to Basque independence. Couched like that, however, such statements make very little impression on weary public opinion, either in the Basque Country or in Madrid.
They have, however, found some cautious support elsewhere.
At the end of March, a group of distinguished Irish and international figures and institutions – including the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mary Robinson, Albert Reynolds, John Hume and former Northern Irish police ombudsman Nuala O’Loan – signed a declaration published in Brussels, in which they “welcome and commend the new public commitment” of the Basque radical pro-independence movement to “exclusively political and democratic” means.
The declaration called on Eta to declare a permanent, verifiable ceasefire, and indicated that this should evoke an “appropriate response” from Madrid.
But Eta has failed, so far, to make the first move.
An international mediator, who participated very actively in previous Basque peace talks but not in these new developments, is sceptical of short-term progress. He agrees that, while the majority of the Basque radical movement may at last be ready to bid an historic farewell to arms, the problem now is neither of the big Spanish parties sees any reason to engage with a group they believe to be defeated, and so the conflict could erupt again in the future.
“Positions are evolving. In the long run this can be of great help,” he told The Irish Times. But he warned against undue optimism. “A lot is being done among like-minded people, much less among those who don’t plan to sit down and talk, at least not now. But one has to start somewhere,” he said, describing current moves as “a step in the right direction”.