ANALYSIS:The "armed struggle" for Basque independence appears to be over, but an unarmed strategy has given the Basque radical movement a surprising new lease of life
‘ETA IS on the point of losing the war. We must ensure that it does not win the peace,” Spanish interior minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba warned recently. Yet many Spanish people believe that is exactly what is happening in the Basque Country today.
Inevitably, things are rather more complicated than that. But, as ever in politics, what people believe may be more important than how things actually are.
Eta’s unilateral ceasefire – there has been no quid pro quo from Madrid – has lasted almost a year, and its associated political movement has surged in support during the same period. Following May’s local elections, Bildu, a new coalition close to the ideology of Eta – but explicitly rejecting its terrorist methods – has more public representatives than any other party in the region.
A Bildu mayor is in charge of the elegant and affluent provincial capital of San Sebastián, which has just won the title of European Capital of Culture for 2016.
Rival cities like Zaragoza have expressed outrage, claiming that Bildu will use the title as an international platform to promote Basque self-determination. Bildu says it will make the city a model for post-conflict reconciliation.
Eta (Basque Homeland and Liberty) has been fighting for an independent and socialist Basque Country since the 1960s. Initially, many admired its armed resistance to the dictatorship of Gen Franco, who had attempted to crush all expressions of a distinct Basque identity.
Many observers expected the group to fade away with the Spanish transition to democracy in the late 1970s, when extensive powers of self-government were granted to the Basque region.
Instead, Eta accelerated an increasingly indiscriminate terrorist campaign, claiming that nothing less than full independence could guarantee real democracy for the Basques. The group was small, but never isolated – its political associates in Batasuna generally polled 15 per cent of the Basque vote, until that party was banned in 2002.
Heavily influenced by developments in Northern Ireland, and by its own increasingly obvious irrelevance after the rise of Islamist terrorism, Eta embarked on peace processes in 1998-9 and 2006.
Both collapsed, the second after Eta’s bombing of Madrid’s T4 airport terminal in which two people died.
These talks failed for two underlying reasons. Firstly, Spanish governments never contemplated anything along the lines of a Downing Street declaration. They have very big strategic and economic interests in the Basque Country. And they often see the region, as senior Partido Popular (PP) leader Jaime Mayor Oreja, who is a Basque himself, once told me, “not just as part of Spain, but as the heart of Spain”.
Secondly, Eta learned none of the negotiating flexibility of the IRA, imposing unrealistic agendas on its political associates.
For Batasuna, the T4 bombing was a breaking point. “The talks had generated huge expectations among our supporters,” says Rufi Etxeberria, a veteran Batasuna negotiator and formerly regarded as a hawk very close to the thinking of Eta.
After discussions stalled in 2006, “Eta saw an armed action as a way of forcing the government’s hand. But instead of advancing the negotiations, this bombing destroyed them. So the question for our leadership became whether there was any role for armed struggle in this process.”
This opened up an unprecedented debate among Batasuna supporters about violence, encouraged by Etxeberria and the currently jailed Batasuna leader Arnaldo Otegi, but involving several thousand ordinary members.
Since the banning of Batasuna, they had seen a dozen surrogate parties also made illegal because they refused to condemn violence. They were frustrated by this exclusion from politics. And – though Etxeberria inevitably denies that this was a factor – they must have been aware that Eta had been chronically weakened by the police, and was incapable of mounting a significant armed campaign in any case.
They engaged the “facilitation” at these meetings of the South African lawyer Brian Currin, who had participated in the Northern Irish peace process. But this was now a very different scenario: the radicals knew that Madrid now had no interest whatsoever in opening new talks, even if Eta disappeared.
“People wanted to know,” says Currin, “how they could be sure that, if there was a permanent ceasefire, the other side would come to the party. My answer was, ‘You can’t be sure, but you can be sure of one thing: if there is a continuation of the strategy of violence, your political project has no chance of succeeding. But if you condemn violence and you are legalised, you will be doing exactly the opposite of what Madrid wants you to do: you will be turning politics in the Basque Country on its head’.
“They did that and are now very quickly seeing the benefits. Three years ago they were nothing, they were on the way out. For the last two years they have been front page almost every day and set the agenda. The turnabout is huge. That is another reason why violence is finished. What are the consequences of Eta committing another act of violence? A disaster for the political movement.”
A broad range of people I spoke to in the Basque Country share this view that the shift away from violence is irreversible, for the first time since the foundation of Eta.
But huge problems remain. The hard-right PP is likely to oust the current Socialist Party (PSOE) government in general elections due by March 2012. The PP is fiercely opposed to any concessions to Basque nationalism, let alone any amnesty for the hundreds of Eta prisoners still facing long sentences. It even demands the banning of Bildu, insisting that its legally impeccable stance on terrorism is a sham.
Meanwhile, Otegi and several Batasuna colleagues await a verdict after they were tried for, ironically enough, initiating the discussions that led to Eta’s ceasefire.
Currin, who has enlisted the support of prestigious figures such as Mary Robinson, Nuala O’Loan, and the Nelson Mandela Foundation (the “Brussels Group”) to press for a resolution of all outstanding issues internationally, remains optimistic.
“In Northern Ireland, I said a deal would be done with the DUP, not the UUP,” he says.
“It is much easier for a right-wing party to make a deal, with no one looking over its shoulder.”
Paddy Woodworth is the author of two books about the Basque Country. www.paddywoodworth.com