THE UNPRECEDENTED killing of a French police officer by the Basque terrorist group Eta marks a critical, possibly even terminal, departure in its half-century-old campaign for an independent Basque state. It will put Eta members under enormous pressure from the French security forces and, more significantly, bring the group close to rupture with its own supporters on the Spanish side of the border.
ETA claims that both the French and Spanish Basque provinces should form part of an independent state, but its big quarrel has always been with Madrid, not Paris. Indeed, Eta enjoyed significant support from the French authorities and public during its first decades.
They saw its struggle against General Franco’s dictatorship as quite similar to the guerrilla war carried out by their own Résistance to the Nazis. So much so that the French gave fugitive Eta leaders official political refugee status even after Spain moved towards democracy, causing intense frustration in Madrid. In fact, Paris only began extraditing suspected terrorists in earnest to Spain in the late 1980s, after senior elements in the Spanish administration had conducted a bloody dirty war campaign against Eta on French soil, which cost the lives of innocent French citizens as well as of suspected militants.
Memories of this dark period have been revived this week by the mysterious discovery of the body of an Eta militant, Jon Anza, in a French morgue. But while all democrats must demand that such deaths be fully investigated, Tuesday’s killing near Paris will rob this development of any significant propaganda value to the radicals in France. Patrolman Jean-Serge Nérin was shot while about 10 members of Eta were resisting arrest.
Although Eta consider the Spanish security forces to be “legitimate” political targets, its members have usually considered the French police to be untouchable, even during hot pursuit. Whatever Eta’s long-term political wish-list, the “French sanctuary” was far too valuable an asset in the campaign against Spain to be put at risk. However, the increasingly wholehearted (and very successful) co-operation between French and Spanish security forces in recent years, has shifted this thinking towards a new recklessness. This has now found full expression though at a high price for Eta: already intense surveillance from the French police will be ratcheted up now that one of their own has suffered a fate so familiar to Spanish officers.
Eta could probably survive such pressure if it continued to have the uncritical support of those sectors of Spanish Basque society on which it has relied to provide new recruits for so long. However, statements from this quarter over the last few months have been moving steadily towards a definitive rejection of violence. In the wake of Nérin’s killing, calls from radical groups on Eta to give unequivocal backing to a purely democratic strategy have multiplied. It remains to be seen whether Eta’s leadership has sufficient residual wisdom and courage to make the only positive gesture remaining in its repertoire – its own unconditional dissolution.