It has the feel of a secret, slightly dangerous assignment – as if I was meeting someone from an underground, illegal movement. I have arranged to see Gotzone at the university, but I do not yet know where. Gotzone, when she is there, often has to hide. She is a lecturer, and has been in this faculty for almost thirty years, but that is no protection. I am to call her mobile phone before I set off. Her instructions, when we speak, are to get to the university and then call again. These are routine safety procedures, she explains. She does not want me to feel offended.
The campus is a compact, ugly jumble of glass walls and concrete pillars on a hilltop outside Bilbao, the Basque Country’s biggest city. I sit on a raised circular dais in the atrium of the university library and call again. Gotzone tells me to wait. Someone will come and find me. A young man in black casual clothes hisses to me – that Spanish ‘tsss, tsss’ that means ‘look over here’ – from the top of the staircase. He crooks a finger. He is too smartly dressed, and is just a bit too old, to be a student. There is a bulge in his jacket, too, where a pistol sits. This is one of her bodyguards. I walk up the stairs and he signals me to follow. He looks carefully around as we walk off.
I experience a sadly familiar, depressing feeling. I am back in the Basque Country. Once more I must talk to people about violence and fear. Why is it, three decades after democracy arrived, that this prosperous, northern patch of Spain is still stained by bloody hatreds? Domestic terrorism has, after all, almost disappeared from the rest of western Europe. It is early in 2005. I have been coming here as a journalist, on and off, for a dozen years. I am still, however, writing the same story. The axe and the serpent, symbols of the violent Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) – Basque Homeland and Freedom – separatist group cast a shadow almost wherever I go. Rumour has it that a peace process might be starting. I hope it does. But, for the moment, ETA would still like to kill Gotzone. And, even if peace does arrive, the damage done over three decades of violence is too large for it to be overcome instantly by a few signatures on a piece of paper. ETA, or the violent emotions that drive it, will be present for a long time to come. If it is not here in person, its spectre will be.
We greet another bodyguard, who is standing in a corridor. He ushers me into one of the hundreds of nondescript offices dotted around the campus. Gotzone is in there with her cardboard boxes. ‘As I change offices, they come with me,’ she explains. Changing offices is part of her life.
She currently has three offices. One is official, but her bodyguards do not let her go there too often. So there are two other secret ones as well, like this, in different departments. When she gives a lecture, however, everyone knows where she is – even with two bodyguards at the door.
Gotzone Mora is small, with that neat, short haircut favoured by Basque women above a certain age. She wears frameless glasses over hazel eyes and has two solid gold earrings clamped to her lobes. Basques have more than double the normal incidence of the rhesus negative blood type. This is almost certainly a left-over – along with their remarkable language euskara – from their centuries as one of the most isolated groups in Europe. To me, however, the main physical aspect that differentiates some Basques from other Spaniards – apart from the women’s practical, sensibly short haircuts – are their noses. Gotzone has a fine version of what might be considered the typical Basque nose – large, proud and strong.
Gotzone is hiding from western Europe’s last significant armed separatist group. As well as lecturing on sociology here at the University of the Basque Country, she is a local Socialist politician and an outspoken ETA critic. Documents found in one ETA member’s home revealed an elaborate plan to shoot her at the university. They contained the following commentary: ‘Gotzone Mora is so far-sighted that she would not see someone put a gun to her head.’ A bomb planted in the faculty lift a couple of years ago failed to go off. Police believe it was waiting for Gotzone or one of two other professors here who have been vocal in their denunciation of separatist violence. ‘They could have brought the whole place down,’ she says. Now she takes the stairs.
An election campaign for the regional Basque assembly, which elects what is already one of the most autonomous regional governments in Europe, is on. ETA, it is said, has ordered its people to ‘put corpses on the negotiating table’, as it prepares for talks. Gotzone is a prime target. ‘I have been told the more time I spend outside the Basque Country, or even outside Spain, the better,’ she says. ‘The trick is to make sure that, if ETA finally stops, you are not the last one to be killed.’
The locks to the door on her main office have had to be changed six times because the master-key keeps disappearing from the porters’ room. She suspects colleagues, or university employees, who support ETA and are either prepared to help them kill her or just want her to be frightened. When we visit it, she shows me a bookshelf that had been mysteriously moved from the wall a few days ago, before the latest lock-change. ‘We think they wanted to plant a bomb behind it,’ she said. She now has the only key.
The high-pitched sound of a txistu (a Basque flute) and of drums floats up towards her temporary office. Somewhere on campus, she explains, there is a demonstration in favour of letting ETA members back to study – from their prison cells – on the university’s courses. It was a right they lost after Gotzone discovered that lecturers were being threatened by their jailed students. A colleague had received a letter from Idoia López Riaño, alias La Tigresa, The Tigress. La Tigresa, accused of twenty-three killings, has been in jail for a decade. ‘You know what to do if you do not want problems,’ the letter said, according to Gotzone. She meant, Gotzone explained, that he was expected to pass her at exam time. That would improve her job prospects when she got out.
Gotzone tries to avoid walking past the regular demonstrations calling on the ETA prisoners – who can now study at Spain’s distance-learning university – to be let back. ‘¡Puta socialista, vete a España!’ ‘Socialist whore, go to Spain!’ they shout at her if she goes near them. One day she went to the bathroom and found ‘Gotzone Mora; ETA, mátala’ – ‘ETA, kill Gotzone Mora’ – graffitied on the wall.
‘The radicals are a minority, but they manage to spoil everything. Campus life is dead,’ she says. Later on I see the two musicians. They are grey-haired, red-cheeked men wearing large, black, floppy Basque berets. They are wandering around the campus, still playing. Music should be pleasure. Hearing it now, with Gotzone’s explanation, it sounds like menace. It reminds me of the Protestant Apprentice Boys on their marches through Catholic territory in Northern Ireland. Or am I just being infected by paranoia?
As I walk beside Gotzone, I find I have to make an effort to stick close by her side. The natural thing to do is drift away. The chances of anything happening to her, here, with two bodyguards and ETA on what may – or may not – be its last legs, is minimal. But she carries the mark of the hunted. Instinctively, and ashamedly, I am uncomfortable beside her. I notice that other people on campus either blank her out or avoid her. ‘My neighbours at home complain. They worry that if my car is bombed, it might affect them,’ she says. The impact on her social life is also devastating: ‘People do not want to be seen out with me.’ Then there is her family. Her husband, a law lecturer, has been sidelined at the university, she claims. Friends say his health has been affected.
I ask why she puts up with it. She explains that there have been political and trades union militants on both sides of her family. Spanish socialism had its first flowering right here, in and around Bilbao, in the 1890s. Dolores Ibarruri, the Basque communist firebrand known as La Pasionaria, once hid out in her family’s house. La Pasionaria’s most famous phrase was: ‘¡No pasarán!’, ‘They shall not pass!’ It was uttered during the Spanish Civil War and directed at Franco’s troops.
‘When I can’t stand it any more then I’ll just leave,’ Gotzone says. She would not be the first to go. There are no reliable figures but lecturers, politicians, journalists and businessmen – those on ETA’s list of targets – are amongst those who have fled. It amounts to a kind of intellectual cleansing, she says.
Gotzone’s biggest complaints, however, are reserved for the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV), the Basque Nationalist Party. If Basque society is neatly sliced into two halves – one that favours unity with Spain and one that tries continually to either weaken or break the tie – then the nacionalistas are the leading force against the latter. They have, through a variety of coalitions, controlled the Basque Country’s regional government for the quarter century since it was established. Since then, critics like Gotzone claim, the nationalists have set about moulding the Basque Country to their own desires.
Nationalism in the Basque Country, as in Catalonia, is as much an emotion – or an identity – as a set of political arguments. Its voters are people who put their Basque-ness before any other political desire. Because, like religion, it is based on belief and feeling, other politicians find nationalism hard to battle against. Its most fervent critics tend to be repentant former members of the clan. One of them, the writer and former ETA member Jon Juaristi, has described the dominant emotion of nationalism as ‘patriotic melancholy … though they do not cry for the loss of something real. The nation did not exist before nationalism came into existence.’ This contradiction, he claims, is resolved by inventing a past out of historias rather than historia – stories, not history. Those stories, he says, are inevitably about loss. There is always a victim, too. The victim must be Basque, if it is not the Basque Country itself.
Gotzone has a deep dislike and distrust of Basque nationalists. She complains that, amongst other things, Basque schoolchildren are now taught that their natural patria extends into the Basque region of France and into neighbouring Navarre. She obviously thinks that, consciously or unconsciously, the nationalists egg ETA on. The pro-nationalist media, she says, paint her as a dangerous madwoman. ‘They are making me a target … If ETA kills me, it will be clear to everybody that I was already an impresentable, a disgrace.’ Few are prepared to raise their voices against ETA – or even Basque nationalism – as loudly as this. ‘I know I scream, but some screaming has to be done,’ she says.
I do not share all of Gotzone’s ideas about the Basque Country or nationalists, but I cannot help admiring her determination to scream. For it is a dangerous, potentially lethal, thing for a Basque to do. Those who dare raise their voices are, however, privately thanked for doing so. ‘I have cried for you and I have felt terribly frustrated for remaining silent, for not banding together with my classmates and coming to your aid … but we, too, are afraid,’ one student wrote to Gotzone. ‘Thank you for telling us that murder makes no sense; thank you for fighting for my freedom; thank you for being on the side of those who suffer; thank you for being there, day after day.’
Gotzone is a councillor in her home town of Getxo, which is governed by the Nationalists. She has spent years watching enviously as Nationalist councillors walk calmly out of the door onto the street after meetings while she squeezes into her armour-plated car. Her fellow Socialists and members of the Conservative People’s Party all also have had bodyguards. These have been kept, as this book goes to the printers, although ETA – in a first sign that it is ready to talk – has said they are no longer targets.
I walk with Gotzone as she prepares to leave. The bodyguards, one behind and one in front, lead her through the campus. They call ahead to their colleagues in the cars. Two Peugeots await in the car park – a blue one with armour-plating for Gotzone to ride in and a silver one to follow her. Gotzone opens one of the doors. ‘These doors are so heavy that they give me cramp,’ she complains. The cars speed off. As I watch them go, I find myself hoping, once again, that this is my last encounter with Basque violence and the fear that goes with it. It may be. ETA has never been so weak. A new government is willing to talk. It may, still, be able to bow out without humiliation. But there have been talks and ceasefires before that were followed by more violence.
Long ago, when I first came here, I was captivated by the romance of the Basques. There is something deeply attractive, dashing even, about a small group of people proudly defending their culture in a globalising world. That unique language, those strange sports, the food, the steep, green valleys and the wide-open Cantabrian Sea are all captivating. They start to pall, however, if you only ever come here to talk about shootings, bombings and kidnappings. At my regular hotel in San Sebastián, a small, charming, secret place, the owners once told me that they thought I was jinxed. ‘Something always seems to happen when you are here,’ one of the family explained.
My view is, of course, skewed by the experiences of a journalist. Only a small minority of Basques have shared Gotzone’s daily contact with violence. Even when I have tried to avoid it, however, the violence has had a way of throwing itself into my line of sight. Not even the gleaming Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao – its shiny, sculpted titanium roof picking up the clouds that scud over one of Spain’s rainiest cities – has managed to quite avoid the curse of ETA. The dazzling museum designed by architect Frank Gehry is the glittering new image of a city, and a region, that, like the rest of Spain, has undergone profound change over the last three decades. Its opening, however, was marred by the shooting to death of a member of the Basque regional government’s own police force by ETA gunmen. They had been trying to sneak a bomb into the forty-three-foot-high, flower-clad ‘Puppy’ sculpture (of a West Highland White Terrier) by Jeff Koons that stands outside the museum entrance. So it is that a place which boasts a unique language, euskara, and that has fine traditions in everything from sculpture to sport, to writing and cuisine is reduced to a tale of fear and loathing.
The Basques have always had their foreign admirers. Hemingway was one. ‘These Basques are swell people,’ says a character in The Sun Also Rises. George Steer, the twenty-seven-year-old Times journalist who told the world that the Germans had carpet-bombed Guernica during the Civil War, warned future visitors to mind their tongues. ‘There are few things the patient Basque won’t tolerate, and one is the suggestion that he is Spanish,’ he wrote in The Tree of Gernika in 1938. Modern Bascophiles soon capture the anti-nationalist mood music arriving from the rest of Spain. This reached a crescendo under Aznar, when nationalism and terrorism were often – and unjustly – treated as one and the same thing. It is easy, however, to swing too far in the opposite direction. Mark Kurlansky’s The Basque History of the World is, in most ways, a brilliant and informed journey through the delights of Basque cuisine, history, navigation, whale-hunting, fishing, music, customs and politics. The failure of a temporary and unilateral ETA ceasefire in 1998 is, however, laid firmly on Madrid. Kurlansky produces the most absurd of reasons. ‘How would Spain justify its huge armed forces, Guardia Civil and police if it no longer had enemies?’ he asks.
Gotzone Mora is right about one thing. Silence makes the Basque Country different. Spain is, in many ways, a journalist’s paradise. Everybody has an opinion and everybody is prepared to share it with you. It makes the basic task of reporting a simple and enjoyable matter. Approaching strangers in the street in Bilbao or San Sebastián, however, I often find them politely declining to answer my questions. Polls have shown that a quarter of Basques believe they are not free to talk about politics.
It is not just politics that are dangerous ground. Start discussing anything from Basque history to folklore and you stand a chance of offending someone almost immediately. It is often wise, in fact, to find out which side of the nationalist fence the person you are talking to sits on before opening your mouth about anything other than the weather, food or relative merits of Athletico de Bilbao and Real Sociedad football clubs. Just by starting this chapter off with an avowed anti-nationalist like Gotzone Mora, for example, is to risk alienating a significant number of Basques.
History is one of the worst areas to venture into. Basques outdo even other Spaniards when stretching their political rows back in time. ‘In conversations with Basques, it is not unusual to hear expressions such as “that only happened 5,000 years ago”,’ Basque anthropologist Joseba Zulaika observes. Another academic expert, Roger Collins, points out that the ‘politicisation of normally abstruse and recherché anthropological arguments about the Stone Age’ underpins nationalist ideology. ‘Few statements relating to people, their history and their language can be treated as politically neutral,’ he warns. ‘Few statements? None at all,’ adds Dirty War, Clean Hands author Paddy Woodworth.
There is another characteristic at work, however, when Basques stay silent, for they are famously timid. ‘Short on words but long on deeds,’ was the description of Basques given by a character in Tirso de Molina’s seventeenth-century play Prudence in a Woman. ‘A Basque, however courageous he is in the wild, is timid and shy when confronted by man,’ agreed the Basque writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno more than two centuries later.
Basques have a reputation as adventurers, sailors and out-doorsmen. Kurlansky claims they made it to North America before Cabot ‘discovered’ it in 1497, but kept quiet about it because of the rich fisheries they found off Newfoundland. The first person to circumnavigate the globe was the Basque Juan Sebastián Elcano – who took over command of Magellan’s ships when he was killed by Filipino tribesmen in 1520. Basque sports are rugged, outdoors stuff, too. They have axe-wielding, log-chopping aizkolariak, stone-lifting harrijasotzaileak and teams for soka-tira, tug-of-war. Broad-shouldered oxen, meanwhile, compete dragging heavy weights in Idi-probak trials. These are as much trials of endurance as they are of strength. Basques bet, too. Sometimes the bets are laid between competitors. In Vacas, Julio Medem’s film of Basque wars, cows and rivalries, the source of one hero’s wealth is his skill with the axe.
If a Basque is shy when confronted by man, he (or she) is reputed to be even more timid when confronted by the opposite sex. ‘It’s a straightforward choice,’ the Basque comic Oscar Terol explains. ‘Either you can be Basque, or you can have sex.’ This has something to do with what Unamuno once called a ‘puritanical’ Basque approach to religion. ‘Priests have told me that they know, from the confessional, that the exceedingly rare cases of adultery that occur in our mountains are owed, in great part, to the woman’s anxiety to have children, when the husband does not give them,’ he said. Traditionally Basques have often sought the company of their own sex. The cuadrilla – the same-sex group of friends who meet almost daily for a drink or two – can still be seen doing the rounds of bars in the evenings.
Nationalisms are, by definition, exclusive – despite the loud denials here in the Basque Country and in Catalonia. That makes them unintelligible to most outsiders, a red rag to other Spaniards and a cross to bear for fellow Basques who do not share their creed.
Many people blame one man for the fear, violence and hatred that runs through the Basque Country. Sabino Arana, the father of Basque nationalism, died a century ago. He had a short but eventful and controversial political life, creating the Basque Nationalist Party along the way. Today, his words and ideas continue to fire both nationalism and ETA. A hundred years after his death he has become one of the most argued over figures in Spanish history. I decided to visit the foundation that honours his name in Artea, a village on the old road inland from Bilbao up towards the regional capital Vitoria and the plains of Alava.
On the way there, I first looped around Bilbao to look at Neguri, Getxo and Las Arenas – the wealthy outer suburbs of greater Bilbao. Large stone mansions stand on the shores of the Nervión estuary where it opens out to the Bay of Biscay. The mansions look across the water at a south shore populated with dockside cranes, piles of scrap metal and smokestack industries. This is Bilbao’s wealth staring across the water at its own source. In Las Arenas I drove my car onto the wobbly platform that hangs from the vast iron structure of the Vizcaya Bridge. This is the world’s first ‘transporter bridge’, erected in 1893. Only thirteen of them were ever built, with seven of them in Britain. It is a monument to the Basque Country’s – and Bilbao’s – place at the heart of Spain’s (late nineteenth-century) industrial revolution. A platform for half a dozen cars and a hundred or so foot passengers hangs from the 150-ft-high iron structure that spans the murky Nervión. It runs, swaying gently, along rails atop the structure. A dozen cables kept us suspended above the river for the two minutes it took to deliver me into the industrial left bank neighbourhood of Portugalete.
Locally mined iron ore and timber from Basque forests provided the raw materials of this industrial revolution. Hungry Spaniards from further south provided much of the manpower – for a miserable life of twelve hour days and twenty-five-year lifespans.
For Spaniards from elsewhere, one of the things that most hurts about separatism and nationalism in the Basque Country is that these are now amongst the richest people in the land. Per capita disposable household income in the Basque Country is the highest in Spain. It is not the poor who seek emancipation, but the rich.
As I drove on to Artea, I recalled the people I had met several years earlier, when I embarked on a project to make an oral record of Basque violence. Inspired by Tony Parker’s May The Lord in His Mercy be Kind to Belfast, I wanted to give voice to those who lived the violence directly – both victims and perpetrators – letting each speak for themselves in their own words. The project did not prosper, but the research immersed me for a few months in the suffering caused by Basque violence.
‘The trouble with the Spaniards is that they have never stopped being conquistadores,’ said the barman in one village near Vitoria as he invited me to a chato, a small glass, of red wine and some slices of chorizo. ‘They think they are better than us.’ The conquistadores he was talking about were just two dozen miles away across the plain in the Castilian province of Burgos. The bar belonged to Blanca, a small, strong-willed and bitter woman in her mid-seventies. The youngest two of her seven children were ETA men. One was in jail. The other was in a niche at the cemetery after a police shoot-out. For Blanca, her sons were wronged angels. ‘Nobody can say my boys are bad,’ she swore. ‘They never tried to harm anybody. Quite the opposite, in fact. When something needed doing here in the village, they always there to do it.’ They were, she insisted, ‘bellas personas’.
José, an etarra (Eta member) who had been let out of jail with medical problems, told me he was pleased to see a new generation of activists appearing. He had been jailed after being caught taking part in the kidnapping, for ransom, of a businessman. He refused to see this as a form of torture. As proof that a kidnapping was no suffering for the victim, he told me anecdotes about how they had managed to play the card game mus with their captive. Mus requires a certain amount of secret nodding and winking between partners, something that, he admitted, had been complicated by the fact that he and the other etarras were wearing masks. More sinisterly, however, he was against a unilateral end to the violence. Basques, he claimed, had been fighting for independence for five hundred years. ‘We should not give way out of tiredness. We have to pass the baton on to the next generation. There are youngsters now who are ready,’ he said.
If the stories of those on ETA’s side were hard, those of the victims were simply heartbreaking. In Seville I met María Dolores, the widow of a police officer who had been machine-gunned to death with three other colleagues. A distraught police sergeant, a friend of her husband, had grabbed a pistol from a colleague and blown his own brains out in front of the four coffins. ‘I think it was a coherent thing to do, given the circumstances,’ she told me. ‘It is hard to see something like that, the shot in the head and the pool of blood … Those who practise violence make you live situations that are beyond belief. It is something you don’t even see in the films.’ María Dolores spent the next seven months dressed in black, without talking, almost without eating and with a permanent fever. ‘The doctors did lots of tests, but they could not say why I had that fever. The body is a mystery. I guess it was the fiebre de tristeza, the fever of sadness,’ she said.
A decade after losing his wife and two daughters, aged thirteen and fifteen, in a bomb attack on Barcelona’s Hipercor supermarket that killed twenty-one people, Álvaro wept as he told me the story of his search for them. He eventually found them, charred black by smoke, in a morgue. ‘I told them it couldn’t be them, that my daughter was white, and my wife too. But eventually I had to admit it. It was my wife and daughter,’ he said. A few hours later he was shown a third body. It was his other daughter. ‘I don’t trust anybody any more. I have made a world for myself, which is me, on my own,’ he told me.
Some victims fantasised about ways of exacting revenge. A wheelchair-bound former Civil Guard officer – whose lack of bodily control meant he wore diapers that needed constant changing – still recalled the hatred in the face of his attackers. He suggested to me that etarras should be hung live on television. He also showed me a photograph of his uniformed daughter – one of the first women to have joined the Civil Guard.
Rosa, the widow of a murdered ertzaina – a police officer in the Basque government’s own force – had had to cope with the fact that he had been shot while sitting at some traffic lights in his car, with her fourteen-year-old son sitting beside him. Her husband came from a euskaldun – a euskara-speaking – family. His grandmother, Rosa told me, had her hair shaved off as punishment for talking euskara. But even ‘good’ Basques – ethnic, nationalist, euskara-speaking – can be in ETA’s sights. It is not just the españolistas who are targets. Graffiti that appeared on some walls in the Basque Country soon after her husband’s killing read: ‘Cabezón, devuelvenos la bala’, ‘Hard-head, give us the bullet back.’ ‘My only worry is that something might happen to my children … That they might go the wrong way because of what happened, and start fighting from the other side,’ she said. Fortunately, if we except GAL and the dirty war, no one here seems tempted by that last option.
Taking the valley road up towards Artea, I was reminded that it was not just Bilbao that took to industry. Up and down the narrow, steep valleys of Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, workshops and small factories, many making machine parts, thrive. A tradition of working iron in small, water-powered ferrerías extended back at least to the fourteenth century – with some three hundred of them in place by the sixteenth century. The Basques had, however, mainly been farming people. Their system of inheritance by primogeniture ensured that property – normally the family farmhouse, the caserío or baserri – remained undivided. The road to Artea followed one of these valleys. Factories, warehouses, workshops and sawmills were dotted along the valley floor. Lone cyclists, wearing the lurid Lycra colours of some local team, pedalled uphill through the truck fumes. Basques are as obsessed by bicycles as they are by balls. The five times Tour de France winner Miguel Induráin emerged from these pedal-obsessed valleys. His imitators continue to risk life and limb amongst the traffic every day.
Caseríos – large and squat with broad, gently sloping roofs – dot the hills. The best examples have three wide storeys – one each for livestock, the family and stores of grain or straw. They also have a generous inset porch that offers protection from the rain. Basque life revolved around these caseríos, sometimes grouped into small villages and hamlets, for centuries.
Caseríos had a life of their own almost above that of their occupants. In the Basque Country it is the people who belong to the etxe or etxea, the house, not the house that belongs to the people. Many Basque surnames begin, in fact, with etxe, or versions of it – Echanove, Etxeberria etc. These are families described by their houses. Some see the emotional roots of nationalism in this concept. ‘Nire aitaren etxea defendituko dut, Oesoen kontra, sikatearen kontra, lukurreriaren kontra, justiziaren kontra’, ‘ I shall defend my father’s house, against wolves, against drought, against usury, against the law,’ starts a poem in euskara by Gabriel Aresti, who died in 1975 at the age of forty-two. In Aresti’s poem, the narrator is prepared to lose all he has, crops, livestock, income, hands, arms and, finally, his life until: ‘I shall die, my soul will be lost, my descendants will be lost, but my father’s house will endure on its feet.’
There is graffiti here, too, in euskara. ‘Presoak etxera orain’, ‘Bring the prisoners home’, it reads. The etxe is here, too, in ‘etxera’. The graffiti refers to the fact that, unlike other Spanish prisoners, unrepentant etarras are punished for their obstinacy by being kept in jails as far from home as possible. This can turn family visits into 1,000-mile hikes every other weekend. The only Spanish flag I see is hanging over the wall of a Civil Guard barracks. But there are no signs of the ‘military occupation’ that more radical separatists insist exists here. There are no roadblocks or army patrols. This is not Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
It is early March and, as I approach Artea, I see that the Gorbeia – one of the many mountains Basques have endowed with magical, mystical powers – is wearing a cap of solid snow. At the foot of the Gorbeia, I turn into the village and look for the large honey-stone building where Sabino Arana’s legacy is carefully preserved.
Arana runs a close second place to Franco as the most controversial historical figure in Spain. Rabid racist and fervent Roman Catholic, he began by claiming that his patria – his homeland – was Vizcaya, the province based on Bilbao. He penned ferocious articles against the maketos – the Spanish immigrants of the industrial slums. He went on to proclaim that his patria was something wider than Vizcaya, that it belonged to a nation which he named Euzkadi. This was the nation of the Basques. Despite his ideological contortionism, Arana lit several fuses over ten intense years of political activity that ended when he died, aged just thirty-eight, in 1903. He himself would be elected as a deputy to the provincial assembly. Within four years of his death, the Basque Nationalist Party had a mayor in Bilbao’s city hall.
For Arana, the people of Vizcaya were ‘intelligent and noble’ or ‘vigorous and agile’ while Spaniards were ‘inexpressive and harsh’ or ‘weak and clumsy’. ‘The Vizcayan cannot serve, he was born to be a señor (‘etxejaun’); the Spaniard is born to be a vassal or a servant,’ he declared. The etxe is here once more. ‘Etxejaun’ is the head of the house. Shortly before his death, however, Arana did a political U-turn. He urged his party members to become españolistas, pro-Spaniards. ‘Good Basques will continue working for their people, but not in isolation, rather within the Spanish state.’ Some see, in this, a call for the kind of autonomy the Basque Country now enjoys. Others say that, after spending time in prison, he simply realised that Spain would never let the Basques go. ‘The survival of his [Basque] country was at stake,’ said the archivist. ‘It was a sign of his grandeur.’
Arana and other Basque Romantics fiddled liberally with history as they sought to find a ‘lost’ Basque nation. This, some said, extended back to one of Noah’s sons. The one thing they could definitely point to as something Basques had been slowly losing, however, was their language.
Euskara is truly remarkable. It has thirteen noun cases, has had to import most of its swear words, does not use the letters c, q, v, w and y and piles on suffixes to make impressively complex-looking words. It is generous with k, z and x, with the latter often combining with t to produce a ‘ch’ sound.
The language’s most expert practitioners are the bersolari – poets who compete by composing ad lib on stage in front of a crowd. A scarcity of irregular verbs and irregular nouns eases the task of learning – though, as two-thirds of the population of the region’s biggest city, Bilbao, will tell you, that does not mean people necessarily want to. About half of the Basques said they could understand or speak euskara in 2001, though fewer than one in six used it as much as, or more than, Castilian.
Try, as they do, linguists cannot find any other living language even vaguely connected to it (though there have been claims for everything from Pictish and Minoan to Sino-Tibetan and North America’s Na-Dene languages). Euskara’s only known relative is ancient Aquitanian. This existed mainly on the northern, French side of the Pyrenees and in the mountains themselves as far as Catalonia. It died out in some areas and evolved into euskara in others, sometime after the appearance of the Romans. Euskara may be the sole surviving version of a family of languages that was, with all other previous western European tongues, wiped out by the Indo-European languages we now speak. Its forebears were being spoken in Europe thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years ago. Along with genetic and other evidence, it is persuasive evidence that Basques remained remarkably homogeneous – and secluded – until immigrants started arriving late in the nineteenth century.
Here is a small example of euskara: Ezkutatu zuen Aitor’ek orduan altxor bat/leize baten sakonagonean,/iñoiz ez, iñork ez ebastu zezan/Eta an irauntzen da,/mendietan ezkututa,/aitalenaren isilekoa. / Bere emaitza./Orrela jaio zan enda bat,/orrela jaio zan erri bat,/euskotarrarena./Aitor’en semeak.
It is taken from the Legend of Aitor poem. This describes how the ‘seven tribes’ of the Basque Country (the Spanish provinces of Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya, Alava and Navarre plus the areas of Soule, Labourd and Basse Navarre in France) were formed by the seven sons of Aitor. It was written by the nineteenth-century French Basque Romantic Augustin Chaho. He mistakenly thought that when Basques called themselves aitorren semeak, they were calling themselves the sons of Aitor. In fact, it seems, they were calling themselves ‘sons of good fathers’. A rough translation reads: ‘And so Aitor hid a treasure/ in the depths of a cave/in such a way that nobody could ever steal it/ And there it stays/ hidden in the mountains,/the patriarch’s secret,/his legacy./ So was born a race/so was born a people/that of the euskaros/the sons of Aitor.’
Many clues to Gotzone Mora’s difficult life are to be found right here, in the language. Euskal Herria, the language’s own way of saying ‘Basque Country’, actually means ‘the country of euskara’. By that definition, Euskal Herria had been shrinking – probably for centuries – before Arana. Numbers are, once more, growing. Most Basques, however, still do not know how to speak the language.
Euskara’s system of building words with suffixes allows it to generate new vocabulary easily. Arana, having learned it himself as an adult, soon thought himself fit to invent new words. Many have since disappeared. Others, however, are now highly familiar not just to Basques, but to all Spaniards. What is most revealing about them, however, are the words euskara was missing when nationalism was born.
Arana’s inventions included: Euskadi, the Basque nation; ikurrin, flag; abertzale, patriot; gudari, soldier; aberri, fatherland; and lehendakari, roughly ‘person whose job is to lead’. The fact that he had to invent these words suggests that the Basque desire for statehood was either non-existent or, to be generous, unarticulated at the time.
Basques, however, now live in a region officially called Euskadi. Their president’s official title is ‘Lehendakari’. Their red, green and white flag (also invented by Arana and based on the Union Jack) is known as the ikurriña and their national day (yet another Arana invention) is the Aberri Eguna. Bombs are planted by gudaris, as ETA members consider themselves, while the ezker abertzalea, the ‘patriotic left’ of radical separatists either applauds or tries to explain that this is all a result of centuries of continued Spanish oppression.
Language is another Basque minefield. Just choosing to call a place by its Spanish or Basque name, for example, is a political act. Do I say San Sebastián, for example, or Donostia? Should it be Bilbao, or the euskara version, Bilbo? A good nationalist will usually try to reach for the name in euskara.
In the small museum at Artea there are 1930s badges decorated with swastikas – an ancient Basque symbol for the sun – belonging to the mendigoizales, a mountaineering-cum-nationalist propaganda club of the 1930s. The mendigoizales were a peculiarly Basque phenomenon – a political rambling club. They organised groups to walk up mountains and reflect on the importance and meaning of being Basque. The swastika disappeared from Basque symbolism after the Nazis decided to use it too. It was replaced by its alternative form, the ubiquitous lauburu – with the four arms ending in oval shapes that make it look like a four-leaf clover. The mendigoizales were a reminder that mountains were more than just things to be admired – and climbed – to Basques. Two of Spain’s most important mountain ranges, the Pyrenees and the Cordillera Cantábrica, meet here. Mountain spirits form a central part of pre-Christian Basque mythology. The mother-god Mari is said to use several Basque mountain caves as her home. Other cave-dwelling spirits are capable of transforming themselves into bulls or vultures. Hurl stones at certain mountains, the legends go, and you will incur their wrath.
Basques were amongst the last Europeans to have towns or become Christians. They have made up for it since then. Ignatius de Loyola, the Jesuit founder, was a Basque. His aristocratic family’s torre – a large, square four-storey fortified house – has been conserved beside a huge baroque basilica and shrine devoted to him at Loiola. Some critics of nationalism say the Church, which kept euskara alive from the pulpits and by publishing magazines and books whenever it was persecuted elsewhere, is to blame for everything from Arana to ETA itself. Religion has certainly formed part of nationalism’s historical essence.
Through Arana, nationalists trace themselves back to the Carlists. These were the reactionary, Catholic traditionalists who backed an absolutist pretender to the Spanish crown in the nineteenth century. Arana’s father was a Carlist – opposing liberal reforms that attempted both to create legal equality across Spain and loosen the Church’s power. The Carlists, colourfully attired with large red berets, fought two bloody civil wars in Spain in the nineteenth century. The leader during the first of them (1833–9) was the extravagantly mutton-chopped General Tomás de Zumalacárregui. The Carlists’ great hero died while unsuccessfully besieging Bilbao in 1835. Though nationalists see these as wars against Spain, they also pitched Basque against Basque. Zumalacárregui’s brother Miguel, as the Basque Country’s leading Liberal, helped raise troops to fight him. He went on to be a Spanish justice minister as well as mayor of San Sebastián. Few Basque schoolchildren today, nurtured on stories about Tomás, could name his ultimately more successful brother. The Carlists, always underdogs, provoked the romantic admiration of some commentators. Karl Marx saw them as having ‘a genuinely mass national base of peasants, minor aristocracy and clergy’.
A second Carlist war followed, and failed, in the 1870s. The level of atrocities carried out by both sides appalled observers. They were said to set the pattern for the Spanish Civil War less than a century later. The Carlistas reappeared in that war, on Franco’s side. Basques and Navarrese were prominent amongst them. Some historians say more Basques and Navarrese fought for Franco than against him. His thank you included allowing Navarre to keep some of its autonomous powers – and the maintenance of a special funding regime for Alava province. It also included violent repression of anything that hinted at Basque nationalism. Franco certainly was not going to resurrect the semi-autonomous Basque government that, briefly, had appeared at the outbreak of Civil War. ‘The horrible and sinister nightmare that is Euskadi has fallen defeated forever,’ the first Francoist mayor of Bilbao declared. The Carlists’ red beret, meanwhile, became part of the uniform of the Caudillo’s Movimiento Nacional. ‘[The year] 1936 was, in fact, the first Carlist success. And they imposed on the rest of the Basques their social morals, their symbols and their monuments … My father well remembers the anti-euskara paranoia in 1938 of his mayor, who was a Basque Carlist,’ says Juaristi.
The Carlistas were strongest in the Basque Country, though they also did well in Catalonia and had support elsewhere. They had said they would conserve the fueros, the ancient bills of rights of each Basque province and for neighbouring Navarre that were eventually, after a long period of decline, annulled in 1876. It was a good way of ensuring support. The fueros, each different from the others, dated back to the late Middle Ages. At their strongest, they amounted to a kind of shared sovereignty, partly in the hands of the monarch and partly in the hands of each province. Royal laws and decrees had to meet the conditions of the fuero, which acted like a provincial constitution, before they could be applied. Each province had its own parliament with representatives elected in myriad ways but usually representing a particular constituency of a town, village or district. Spanish customs were only payable at the border with Castile, meaning no export duties were paid to Madrid. Spanish monarchs, in turn, pledged to observe the terms of the fuero. In the case of Vizcaya, the parliaments were eventually held by the famous oak tree at Guernica. Ferdinand and Isabella swore an oath here in 1476, as did Emperor Charles V in 1526.
This Romantic picture of the Basques was captured by William Wordsworth in his ode to Guernica’s oak, written as Spaniards – with help, in what became known as the Peninsular War, from Wellington – were trying to expel Napoleon’s troops in 1810.
The Basque fueros and their parliaments, however, were provincial affairs. Those of Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, Alava and neighbouring Navarre acted autonomously of one another, swearing loyalty to whichever king ruled them. Rights varied, but could include not having to do military service outside their own frontier. What the fueros did not amount to, however, was independence – either as individual provinces or as a state called Euskal Herria, the Basque Country. The last Basque-centred kingdom was that of Navarre – which was conquered, and absorbed into the rest of Spain, in 1512. Both Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa had, in any case, gone into the orbit of Castile by 1200. The last time, in fact, that all the Basque lands – including those in France – were jointly ruled by a Basque was in 1035. This was when Sancho the Great held the kingdom of Navarre. He, however, titled himself King of the Spains, and ruled a far larger area. Collins says Sancho’s rule had no impact on Basque ‘self-awareness or aspirations’. They were too busy squabbling amongst themselves. Their social structure was based, instead, around the family. That does not stop ETA bloodily pursuing the impossible dream of a state that would, a thousand years later, again unite all Basques – be they French or Spanish – under a government of fellow Basque.
If Spanish history is today a political battlefield, Basque history is its bloodiest corner. The fueros, Arana, the tree of Guernica, the kingdom of Navarre and the Carlists are fought over tooth and claw. Even the Battle of Roncesvalles – when Basques fell on Charlemagne’s retreating rearguard in 778 – is the subject of heartfelt, emotional commemorations by separatists. It is still possible, for example, to buy books that state ‘the Basque pueblo was already formed in neolithic times.’
For my archivist in the Sabino Arana Foundation, the fueros obviously represented a golden era. Nationalists mourn what they see as a lost Basque Arcadia, where grass-roots democracy protected the rights of man and there was harmony between man and nature. It is a world of clover-filled pastures, isolated valleys, peacefully ruminating cows, deciduous forests, mountain spirits, sturdy farmhouses, noble souls and fiercely proud farmers, blacksmiths and lumberjacks prepared to defend their idyll against all comers.
I left the Sabino Arana Foundation unenlightened as to the true course of Basque history. One thing, however, was clear. The founder of the Basque Nationalist Party had planted his political seed in fertile ground. The robust nationalist tree, despite the efforts of dictatorial force and democratic persuasion, has grown and gathered strength ever since.
I drove around behind Artea’s church and its frontón – a sort of large, open squash court with just two walls in the shape of a long L, where pelota vasca, literally ‘Basque ball’, is played. The frontón is a feature of almost any Basque village. Larger towns – in both the French and the Spanish regions – boast covered, all-seater frontones with a third wall at the back. Here the great players of the sport knock a hard ball against the walls using their hands, small wooden rackets or the long-curved baskets of the spectacularly fast and exciting cesta punta or Jai-Alai version.
I stopped at a large building on the other side of the village. Measured in historical time, this was a journey of more than six decades from the time when Sabino Arana died. I was moving on to the 1960s, to the time ETA first emerged as a fighting force. It was a time when younger nationalists became frustrated with the Basque Nationalist Party’s peaceful opposition in exile and reached for their guns. I had come to see Xabier Zumalde, alias El Cabra (The Goat), who was one of the first to pick up a weapon in anger. El Cabra is in his late sixties now, though still lean, fit and keen. Years ago he was one of the first military leaders of what was still an embryonic, amateurish armed outfit. Today he is a maverick. ‘I am a military man,’ he said, as we tried to stave off the cold by an open fire. ‘I don’t understand politics. Give me fifteen or twenty men and I can do anything. Give me any more than that and I am lost.’
El Cabra considered himself a freedom-fighting revolutionary. He handed me a photograph of his younger self wearing a black beret and sporting a revolutionary beard. Che Guevara had been his hero. He spent the final years of the Franco dictatorship running a small group of Basque guerrillas from exile in south-west France, carrying out mostly sabotage and propaganda attacks. In fact, another ex-ETA leader told me, El Cabra’s group rarely, if ever, exchanged shots with the Civil Guard. He buried his arms in zulos, underground hideaways, after Franco died and an amnesty was announced in 1977.
Up until Franco’s death, ETA had fought a classic war of provocation against the Caudillo and his Civil Guard. It had killed forty-four people – including a dozen civilians caught in a bomb attack on a Madrid cafeteria, the Rolando. Two dozen ETA members had also died – in shoot-outs, blowing themselves up, executed or summarily shot. ETA’s original fame stemmed as much from Franco’s violent reaction to it as from the handful of prominent assassinations carried out in those years. Franco declared eleven states of exception during his time in power. Four were nation-wide and six of the seven others covered the Basque provinces of Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya or both. At one stage, a quarter of his Civil Guard was said to be posted to the Basque Country. ‘If Sabino Arana considered Euskadi to be an occupied country, Francoism made that occupation real and effective,’ explains the Basque author of a history of ETA, José María Garmendia. ETA is, in fact, one of Franco’s legacies to modern Spain.
Some of those released or allowed home under the 1977 amnesty law would rejoin ETA and participate in the orgy of killing that swept through the Basque Country in the first years of the Transición. Between 1977 and 1980, more than 250 people would be killed as not just ETA but a swathe of separatist, leftwing revolutionary or reactionary right-wing groups reached for their weapons. ‘It was chaos,’ El Cabra recalled. He, however, stayed away from the fight. ‘I cannot impose my doctrine on others by force,’ he explained. Plenty of others felt they could. Some still do.
Eventually, he set up a museum to the caserío in Artea. He still runs it, though it is clearly in decay as, having fallen out with all the politicians, he no longer receives a grant. It has, amongst other things, displays on farming, on whale-hunting – for centuries a traditional occupation for those living along the coast of the Bay of Biscay, where the first person to land a harpoon on a whale’s back could claim the valuable tongue as a prize – or for hunting wild boar. He has even built a working copy of a medieval ferrería and of a water-driven flour-mill. It is an innocent retirement. El Cabra should be history.
That is what he would have been, had he not decided to mount an exhibition on ETA’s early days and its fight against Franco three decades after the latter’s death. The display included weapons – which had been disabled long ago when he lived in France – as well as mock-ups of zulos and dummies dressed-up as ETA men.
The interesting thing about this exhibition, though, was not what it contained but the uproar it provoked. The ethical narrative of Spanish history has changed. ETA long ago lost its heroic halo as the only armed group capable of inflicting real damage against Francoism. In 1973 it quite possibly changed the course of Spanish history by killing Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, the man who had been expected to continue the Generalísimo’s work when the latter died. ‘Spain’s transition to democracy started that day,’ says Victoria Prego, author of various books on the period.
History, however, is being revised. ETA is now being painted uniformly black. Even its early fight is deemed to be no longer heroic or just. Even those like Gotzone Mora, who as a student leader in the 1970s led campaigns to prevent ETA members being executed by Franco’s firing squads, now think they were wrong to support ETA then. ‘We thought they were fighting Franco. In fact they were fighting for separatism,’ she explains.
Under Aznar, the revising of history went even further. All ETA’s victims – including, for example, the infamous San Sebastián police chief Melitón Manzanas – became official heroes. Aznar’s government awarded them all a medal, the Great Cross of the Royal Order of Civil Recognition to the Victims of Terrorism. If all the victims were now heroes, those who attacked or killed them had to be villains. El Cabra was accused of praising – even encouraging – terrorism. No court, however, found a reason for banning his exhibition. Eventually, given the political scandal, Artea’s Basque nationalist mayor ordered him to close it as the museum was housed in town hall property. ‘The mayor was in the town hall under Franco. When the Transición came he changed jackets and, as he was a banker, the nationalists took him in,’ says El Cabra. ‘It is the nationalists who have shut me down. They did not fight against Franco, they just sat around tocándose los cojones – playing with their balls.’ Police were sent in to enforce the mayor’s order. He tore off the tape which they placed across the exhibition’s entrance in a wooden shed into which he had carved a saying in euskara ‘edozen txoriri eder bere kabia’, ‘every bird thinks its own nest is the best’. ‘Now they are going to try me. Not even Franco managed to send me to prison.’
‘In each family there is someone who receives from the Basque Nationalist Party,’ he says. ‘It has the vote of the grateful stomach.’ This is a common complaint. The Nationalists have run the regional government for more than a quarter of a century. Their critics claim that they have bought the Basque Country up. ‘Where else in the world do parties stay in power for twenty-five years?’ one non-nationalist Basque historian asked me desperately.
If those who El Cabra calls ‘grateful stomachs’ have a modern patron it is not the man who now runs the regional government – the lehendakari Juan José Ibarretxe. It is Xabier Arzalluz, the man who commanded the Basque Nationalist Party for more than two decades.
It would be hard to find a greater hate-figure in Madrid (excepting ETA and its political allies such as the spokesman of the banned Batasuna party, Arnaldo Otegi) than this tough former Jesuit priest whose father had backed Franco during the Civil War. To many critics Arzalluz is the modern incarnation of Arana.
He has occasionally reached for genetic definitions of Basqueness. ‘If there is a single nation that exists in Europe then that has to be Euskadi … there are objective figures such as cranial studies and blood (type) studies. Is there anyone who, after all the studies carried out by the world’s best universities, dares to say that we don’t have rhesus negative?’ he once said.
Arzalluz retired as party boss in 2004. I went to see him in his new office perched a few doors up from the stone Arenal bridge over the Nervión River that connects Bilbao’s old quarter with the modern city. He was beginning to look his seventy-three years. He had, however, lost none of his verbal vigour. Basque Socialists, he said, ‘hate euskara or any form of difference’ and ‘most are not from here and they do not love this country.’ ETA itself, he added, was ‘consumed by hatred’ and was a block to any progress towards independence. Its violence had been a main factor in bringing Aznar to power. During the key Transición years Arzalluz was the Nationalists’ man in Madrid. His party called on Basque voters to boycott the 1978 constitutional referendum (which won the votes of only 31 per cent of Basques, or three-quarters of those who turned up). He helped negotiate, however, a Statute of Autonomy that gave a generous dose of self-government while making no mention of self-determination or Basques not being Spanish. Basques backed that referendum. I wanted to know whether the nationalists’ long-term goal was really independence. Arzalluz, thankfully, does not dress his answers up. ‘The Basque Nationalist Party was born to create a Basque state,’ he replied. Its aim was to make the Basque Country one more star on the European Union’s flag, like Holland or Spain. What mattered above all was that Basques should be able to express their own will.
The PNV was not in a hurry, he said, but that should be the ultimate goal. Given that between them, Nationalists and the ezker abertzale separatists consistently gain just over half of Basque votes in regional elections, that might be taken as a majority for independence. In fact many Nationalist politicians – and many of their voters – are more moderate than Arzalluz. Opinion polls show only a third of Basques want a separate state. A similar number – which has to include some Socialist voters – would like Spain to be a federation. The rest are broadly happy with it as it is.
Self-determination lies at the heart of the Basque problem. It is a right that does not, legally, exist – though the Basque parliament wants it. Ibarretxe claims Basques have a right to ‘decide freely and democratically, their own framework of organisation and political relations.’ He put forward a plan which would see them ‘freely associate’ with Spain, but also, in effect, push them a long way down the path towards self-determination and, potentially, independence. Aznar reacted by rushing through a law that would allow him to lock Ibarretxe up if he called a referendum. It was typical Aznar – a measure certain to drive more Basques into the nationalist embrace. Zapatero revoked that law. Ibarretxe’s plan, meanwhile, was approved by a wafer-thin majority in the Basque parliament but rejected by a huge majority of Las Cortes, the parliament in Madrid. The final vote was 313 votes against, and just twenty-nine in favour.
So why not have a referendum on independence? It seems, at least superficially, a fine idea. One vote and, if opinion polls are anything to go by, the Basques would proclaim their desire to remain Spaniards. That should be the end of it – at least for a decent period of time. It would also, surely, be the end of ETA – which would lose even its small amount of support, if it did not hang up its arms anyway.
Self-determination for the Basque Country, however, does not win votes elsewhere in Spain (except, perhaps, in Catalonia). The two big Spanish parties – which jointly represent the other half of Basque society – dismiss it with the same arguments. Self-determination belonged to another age, they say, to the era of ‘decolonisation’. The Basque Country is not a colony, the argument goes, therefore self-determination does not apply. There are deeper worries, too. The first is that Basque Nationalist governments, if allowed to, would call referendums ad infinitum until a vote went through – which would be irreversible. What, then, would happen to a million people born, and wanting to stay, Spaniards? What would happen to Alava province, where a pro-independence majority would be impossible to achieve? And if Basques were allowed to vote on independence, who else might want to? The Catalans could be next. Perhaps the Galicians would follow? And where do you draw the self-determination line? In 1873, during the first Spanish Republic, the south-eastern seaport of Cartagena declared itself an independent canton and tried to persuade others to follow suit.
Another reason Spanish politicians give for dismissing self-determination is that this is part of what ETA demands. Any move in that direction could be interpreted as a triumph for terrorism. ‘Our dead do not deserve it,’ said Aznar’s successor at the head of the People’s Party, Mariano Rajoy. The obvious problem with that argument is that it makes anything ETA wants impossible – even if others, who oppose violence, want it too. It is, in fact, a way of turning ETA’s violence to one’s own advantage. It also, however, highlights ETA’s status as a hindrance, rather than a help, on the path to self-determination or independence.
ETA’s decline has been gradual, but steady. In 1980 it killed more than ninety people. An average of thirty-three victims a year died between then and 1992. In the late 1990s it could manage barely a dozen a year. At the start of this century, and despite its efforts to the contrary, it has shown itself incapable of killing for two whole years.
As the years went by, and it found it harder to kill, ETA widened its choice of targets. First it was the police, members of the armed services, chivatos – police informers – and senior politicians. (Also, though, it was many others who simply got in the way when the bomb exploded or the trigger was pulled. There are at least twenty children on ETA’s list of victims.) Then it was judges and public prosecutors. After that, it was civilians working for any of the above. Finally, it became anybody who dared openly oppose the gang, be they intellectuals, journalists or business leaders. It was termed, in a display of warped logic, ‘la socialización del dolor’, ‘the socialization of pain’. The perceived suffering of a minority of pro-violence separatists, in other words, must be shared by everybody else – who should, thus, be forced to feel the terror. It is, unfortunately, a remarkably effective way of shutting people up – as the almost total absence of anti-ETA activity on the university campus shows.
One key moment in ETA’s decline came when a young People’s Party councillor, Miguel Ángel Blanco, from the Basque town of Ermua, was kidnapped in 1997. ETA demanded that, in return for his life, its prisoners be sent from jails around Spain to those in the Basque Country within forty-eight hours. It knew, however, that with Aznar in power, that was never going to happen. As the hours went by towards the deadline a sense of doom spread across Spain. Blanco’s fate held the nation on tenterhooks. The Saturday of the deadline, I recall, there was a general air of anxious nervousness. I was in a village near Segovia, on what was meant to be a convivial day out – bathing in a river – with a party of friends. But everyone was thinking of Blanco, knowing the minutes were ticking by. Then the news came. Gunshots had been heard in woods near the town of Lasarte. A huntsman out shooting had gone to investigate. He had found a seriously wounded man with two gunshots in the head and his hands tied. Television pictures showed an ambulance delivering the man to hospital. ETA’s attempt at cold-blooded execution of a defenceless prisoner had been ham-fisted and messy. But there was little that could be done. Within twelve hours, Blanco was dead. The screw of violence had been given another cruel twist. It was one of those moments when Spaniards showed their almost unique ability for protesting en masse. Up to 3 million Spaniards took to the streets two days later to show their disgust – with the streets of Basque cities such as Bilbao and San Sebastián also filling up. ETA’s leaders were stunned by the reaction. Here, for the first time, was mass public opposition from Basques to their terrorism. ‘When they saw those pictures they were amazed – they could not understand,’ explained Iulen de Madariaga, an ETA founder who has left the group.
Two days after Miguel Angel Blanco was killed, my telephone rang. At the other end of the phone a voice began to speak in a heavily accented, inaccurate, but fluid and bizarrely idiomatic English. It was a voice I did not know.
‘I am a friend of the people in Eeee, Teeee, Ayyy,’ the voice said. ‘I used to speak to journalists a lot, but I have not done so for a long time.’ My caller sounded like one of those madmen who pester journalists everywhere with bizarre and improbable tales. I decided, however, to hear him out. I did not take an exact note of the conversation, but the important parts of it went something like this: ‘I have seen the people who were responsible for shooting Blanco. You must know that this is not the end of it. There will be much more,’ he said. The phrase that stuck in my mind was the one used to describe what, he claimed, would be a future campaign of similar killings. The mad professor reached deep into his bag of English idioms. ‘This is the new cottage industry in the Basque Country,’ he said.
Looking back, I see my caller was not so mad. Blanco’s killing, which had been preceded by that of San Sebastián People’s Party councillor Gregorio Ordóñez, was, indeed, the start of a rash of murders of small town councillors belonging to parties deemed to be españolistas. People who, until then, had spent their time arguing over such mundane matters as waste collection, building licences and children’s playgrounds were now worried for their lives. Eleven would be killed over the next three years. Those not killed could find themselves, in radical heartland towns of industrial Guipúzcoa, burnt out of their businesses, their homes petrol-bombed or simply attacked by thugs on the street. One Socialist councillor found a note slipped into her two-year-old’s pocket in the playground. ‘We know where you are and we are going to give it you. Bang! Bang! Bang!’
Masked men would walk into bars where councillors were known to have breakfast and shoot them in the head. In some places even the mask was not necessary. Witnesses could be guaranteed to keep silent. When one of the killers of Gregorio Ordoñez was finally caught, the word was put out that he had been recognised, and reported to police, by a man from whom he bought a bicycle. Letters arrived at local newspapers warning the ‘coward and traitor’ who told police that Lasarte was in a shopping centre to ‘hide well’. ‘Euskadi is the size of a handkerchief and whoever betrays a gudari usually has health problems,’ the letter said. The bicycle salesman soon joined the list of ETA’s victims.
Perhaps the most senseless but revealing killing of all was by a drunken young radical, Mikel Otegi. He convinced himself that two Basque ertzaina police officers driving past his front gate had come to arrest him. He went for his shotgun and killed them in cold blood. A jury made up of ETA supporters and people too scared to oppose them declared him not guilty despite the fact that Otegi’s own brother had called the police. It was a sign of how deep ETA had sunk its teeth into Basque society. The killer fled the country before a new trial could be called. He joined ETA in France and was recaptured several years later.
In the late 1990s things were still much better than a decade earlier, but the corpses of councillors were piling up. The state replied by providing them all with armed bodyguards. ETA responded by widening its list of targets further. Journalists, opinion-makers and intellectuals were next. El Mundo columnist José Luis López De Lacalle, a sixty-three-year-old former anti-Francoist militant who had suffered jail, was gunned down as he bought the Sunday newspapers. A bomb left in a flower pot failed to go off as Juan Francisco Palomo and Aurora Intxausti, journalists for Antena 3 and El País, wheeled their eighteen-month-old son out of their house in San Sebastián in his buggy. Gorka Landaburu, of Cambio 16 magazine, had his fingers blown off by a parcel bomb. More bodyguards arrived to protect the university professors, journalists and intellectuals now under threat.
Watching three city councillors in Bilbao leaving a bar after a coffee, I realised just how saturated with bodyguards the place had become. As they moved, six other people began moving too, getting ahead of them to scour the street, walking beside, behind or just in front of them for the fifty metres it took for them to get back to their offices. Town hall meetings in some places required the presence of dozens of bodyguards. The Basque Country must have had more of them per square mile than anywhere else in Europe.
An already weak ETA called a unilateral ceasefire in 1998. It was dismissed out of hand by Aznar’s government as a trap. Fourteen months later ETA unilaterally brought the ceasefire to an end. For Basques it was a tantalising taste of peace. For abertzale radicals, it was a political boon. Their share of votes increased to between 18 and 20 per cent in municipal and regional elections held that year. For ETA, however, it was a time to rearm and reorganise. It came back fast and furious for a couple of years, but police slowly strangled its capacity for action. By 2002 it was already killing only in single figures. French police became especially active. In 2004, despite its attempts, it failed, for the first year in three decades, to kill anyone at all. The abertzales, now gathered in Batasuna, lost one-third of their voters. Then Batasuna was banned altogether.
Numerous ETA members were picked up at what were described as ‘routine police checkpoints’ in France. Rumours began to appear that the same French police officers were at every checkpoint where the terrorists were caught. France had been slowly increasing the pressure on ETA since GAL had carried out attacks on French soil in the 1980s. Now it was arresting dozens of ETA suspects every year. The group’s leadership was broken up time and time again. ETA itself was said to be infiltrated all the way through. Some ETA members even broke the group’s longstanding policy of not shooting back when in France – with gendarmes being wounded. That policy had been meant to ease police pressure on the hideouts in France where its leadership, training and logistics are based and from where it organises its attacks.
Spain can claim to have carried out one of the world’s most effective anti-terrorist policies. ETA could keep going for years, if it wanted. It has enough support. Militancy often goes through more than one generation of a family. Even a fresh ceasefire would be no guarantee that it might not reappear at a later date. It looks, however, unlikely ever to become as dangerous as it was in the 1980s – unless, in a radical change, it turns to totally unrestrained attacks against arbitrary targets. That tactic would see its support all but evaporate. A definitive renunciation of violence, meanwhile, would probably see the abertzale left launched into the centre of Basque politics. If the 1998 temporary cease-fire gave it 18 to 20 per cent of votes – how much more could it get for a full-time one? Just a little more, and it would become the second power in the region. As its violence decreases at the time of writing this book, hopes grow that it may be tempted to follow that path. Parliament has given the Zapatero government permission to negotiate if ETA renouces violence permanently. Some analysts say that ETA must first recognise that, militarily, it has been defeated. ETA, however, is nothing if not unpredictable.
The one thing police have not been able to crack has been the group’s financing. Much of this used to be provided by the rewards of kidnappings – usually of members of prominent Basque business empires. Several years have gone by, though, since the last kidnapping. ETA’s other main source of income has traditionally been an extortion racket it calls the impuesto revolucionario – the revolutionary tax. Directors of large companies, small businessmen, lawyers and accountants are amongst those invited to pay up – or pay the consequences.
Those consequences can run from murder to the firebombing of your shop or business. José María Korta, a business leader from San Sebastián who refused to pay and called on others to follow his example, died when a bomb was placed under his car in August 2000. How many Basques share Korta’s courage? How many pay up? And how many large companies are secretly topping up the group’s funds in order to be left alone? One example serves to suggest that the extortion racket goes much further than most suspect. In 2004, a stock-market-listed vending-machine company called Azkoyen replaced several board members after Judge Garzón accused an executive of handing over £150,000 in extortion money. The company, which operates across forty-two countries and has an annual turnover of £85 million, admitted the cash may have gone missing from its accounts a few years earlier. Azkoyen executive Jesús Marcos Calahorra allegedly drove to Vert in November 2001 where, ‘near to the church, he met two unidentified members of ETA to whom he handed over the money’, according to Garzón.
‘Calahorra, obeying an obviously illegal order from the board of directors of Azkoyen – using accounting practices to hide the real destination – handed over the 37 million pesetas in the full knowledge of its real destiny,’ the judge said. Newspapers reported that Mr Calahorra was paid £4,000 for the task. Azkoyen sacked him when the payments became public. He was reinstated by a labour tribunal that said he had just followed the board’s instructions.
The Basque attitude towards paying a tax that buys bullets can be strikingly ambivalent. Again, a single example serves to illustrate. Juan Mari Arzak is the most famous of a group of very famous Basque chefs. The New York Times has placed Spain ahead of France in culinary innovation thanks, in great measure, to Basque chefs. Arzak started a revolution from the kitchen of what used to be his mother’s restaurant – and, before that, his grandparents’ taberna – on a busy road out of San Sebastián. He has, deservedly, been rewarded with three Michelin stars. Other Basque chefs, people like Pedro Subijana and Martín Berasategui, also boast Michelin stars for their restaurants. San Sebastián has always produced chefs, both professional and amateur. Its sociedades gastronómicas, where the (traditionally) male members meet – and compete – to cook and eat Basque dishes, have a history stretching back to at least the mid-nineteenth century.
I have been to Arzak’s restaurant once, to celebrate a birthday. We were lucky. Real Madrid were in town that night, playing San Sebastián’s Real Sociedad. Ringing just a few days before, I was still able to get a table on a Saturday night. A hushed and reverential atmosphere was more than compensated for by the dishes placed before us. Norway lobsters, large carabinero prawns, hake and young pichón pigeon were brought to our table by serious waitresses in grey uniforms. A jolly Arzak appeared at one stage – his happiness undoubtedly increased by Real Sociedad’s victory over Real Madrid – to enquire whether the food had been to our taste. The, not inconsiderable, bill paid, we left, happy, replete and excited by our immersion in Arzak’s brave new Basque cuisine.
Newspaper headlines that appeared some time later, however, suggested that a fraction of our bill may have ended up in ETA’s coffers. Arzak was, reportedly, called to court to explain why his name – along with three other famous chefs, who boasted a further five Michelin stars amongst them – had been cited by an alleged ETA accountant as a revolutionary-taxpayer. It has not been proved that Arzak, or any of the other chefs, paid ETA. Nor have there been any charges, so we must assume that no crime was committed or money paid. But the idea that they might have paid out was not considered shocking by other Basques. ‘The only ones to blame are ETA … judgement should be cast on those who extort and not on those who are victims of extortion,’ Basque government minister Miren Azkarate said. The chefs, she said, were good men. They were ambassadors for the Basque Country. ‘With their daily effort, they have placed this country in first place when it comes to gastronomy … all we can do is offer them our support.’
In 1998 the nationalists broke their alliances with Madrid-based parties and began negotiations with ETA. The nationalists said they were merely trying to wean ETA away from violence. They claim no deal was ever agreed on, or signed. It marked, however, a sea change. From now on the nationalists would increase their demands for greater autonomy and self-determination. It has made them the whipping post of newspaper columnists and radio debate show guests, ever since.
The nationalists presented the attacks on them as further proof of the Basque Country’s victim status. Much of the most passionate vitriol came, however, from the mouths of fellow Basques who write in El Mundo, El País or ABC. The barrage continues today – to such an extent that the nationalists’ radio station, Radio Euskadi, now broadcasts a regular weekly résumé of outrageous comments on Basques and Basque nationalism by tertulianos. The barrage reached its most unpalatable extreme, however, when the film-maker Julio Medem made a documentary in which he aimed to present the differing opinions of Basques to a wide audience. Medem, born in San Sebastián, had dug deep into the Basque arcadia and into themes of violence and cowardice in feature films such as Vacas and La Ardilla Roja (The Red Squirrel).
La Pelota Vasca: la Piel Contra la Piedra (Basque Ball: the Skin Against the Stone) – designed to ‘see hatred without hating it’ – was the most controversial thing to hit Spanish cinemas for years. With Aznar’s party and several prominent anti-ETA intellectuals, including the philosopher Fernando Savater, declining to take part, the result was inevitably skewed in favour of the nationalists. It did not deserve, however, the bile with which it was received by Aznar’s government and others opposed to nationalism (including Gotzone Mora). Culture minister Pilar del Castillo backed calls for it to be banned from San Sebastián’s film festival. The Spanish embassy in London mysteriously withdrew funding for the Spanish strand of the London Film Festival – where it was shown to packed houses – claiming it no longer had sufficient funds. Medem was compared to Hitler’s film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl. One politician demanded he return money that state television TVE had paid to show a previous film.
The reaction was a sign of just how tough the Aznar government was prepared to play with anything that smelt, however faintly, of support for ETA. ‘The majority of us Basques do not confuse nationalism with terrorism,’ Medem complained. ‘But when one travels around Spain one realises an increasing number of Spaniards do.’
With the People’s Party in power, the crack-down on ETA also began to throw up concerns about civil liberties. There was no repeat of the GAL outrages committed under the Socialists. The results, however, still sound shocking: the Basque Country’s fourth-largest political party has been banned; two daily newspapers and a magazine have been closed by the courts, with the editor of one claiming he was tortured by police; a court administrator was appointed to run a series of Basque adult education schools; and various groups supposedly devoted to promoting youth, culture or other pastimes have also been closed or had their organisers charged with collaborating with ETA.
With most of these cases still going through the courts, it is impossible to say just how far, if at all, the anti-terrorist overreach has gone. There is no doubt that, somewhere, parts of some of these groups morph into ETA itself. Others are, probably, just front organisations. Proving exactly where they overlap is difficult. It may be impossible. ETA itself is aware of this. Police claim that it tries to bury itself inside anything from ecology groups to trade unions.
When newspapers, such as the Basque-language Euskaldunon Egunkaria, are closed down on the orders of an investigating magistrate, however, but a trial is not due to be held for several years, it is obviously essential that the case be cast-iron. In 1998 Judge Garzón decreed the temporary closure of the radical paper Egin – which sold 50,000 copies a day – while its connections with ETA were being investigated. By the time he ordered it to be reopened more than a year later, the company that published it was considered bankrupt. When Euskaldunon Egunkaria’s editor, Martxelo Otamendi, accused police of torture, the Aznar government announced it would lobby for him to be charged with ‘collaborating with an armed group’. By making the allegations, it said, he had simply followed ETA’s instructions to its members. ‘To sue alleged torture victims, or to describe allegations as false even before there has been a chance to carry out a thorough investigation, will only help foster and nourish a climate of impunity, in which fear of reprisals prevents the reporting of possible acts of torture,’ Amnesty International said. It is difficult to know what to make of torture allegations in the Basque Country. Amnesty says there is no evidence of systematic torture against ETA suspects. It has demanded, however, that cameras be placed in interrogation cells during the five days in which terrorism suspects can be held incommunicado. In the meantime, police officers found guilty of torture are, Amnesty complains, regularly handed pardons.
The abertzale left knows how to capitalise on any opportunities it is handed to reinforce its image as a victim of Spanish persecution. In 1997 the twenty-three leaders of one of Batasuna’s predecessors, Herri Batasuna, were jailed for showing a video made by ETA during an election campaign. The decision was overturned later by the Constitutional Court but not until after one leader, Eugenio Aramburu, had hung himself in his brother’s caserío rather than go to jail. I went to film the funeral in the village of Mallabia. Folklore, death and hard-edged politics overtook a village where local businesses closed down for the day. There were pipes and drums and dancing girls in long red skirts and white blouses carrying long hoops decorated with ribbons. A male dancer performed a neat, austere and highly acrobatic dance – the aurresku – full of on-the-spot turns and impressively high kicks in front of the coffin. There were also angry speeches and denunciations of Madrid. It all ended with the surprising, high-pitched sound of women ululating and the turning-over by angry radicals of a radio reporter’s car. I do not recall any masked men this time. But at another funeral in Soraluze – this time for an ETA gunwoman shot by the army sergeant she had tried to kill when he stopped his car at a traffic light – masked characters appeared with a huge banner bearing the axe and serpent of ETA.
ETA constantly invites crackdowns. The revolutionary’s maxim of action-repression-reaction (which worked for ETA with Franco) predicts an increase in support if police can be provoked into overstepping the mark. The more ‘martyrs’ or ‘victims’ that are created, the more support holds up. It is a trap for the unwary.
The most controversial of the banned groups was the radical Jarrai youth group. This was considered to be behind a campaign of street violence, the kale borroka, that swept through the Basque Country for several years. Jarrai was, in an expression first attributed to Arzalluz, a meeting place for ‘the pups of ETA’. Before it was closed down I went to see Jarrai in action at a three-day ‘festival’ in the Guipúzcoa village of Zaldibia. The mix of radical politics, Basque folklore and underground culture produced bizarre contrasts as three thousand teenagers and students camped out in a bucolic landscape of green pastures overlooked by steep, verdant hills. Perhaps the strangest thing of all was to see a group of tough, street-wise, medallion-wearing, black Los Angeles heavy-metal rappers called Body Count walking down a Basque Country lane. Their most famous song was ‘Cop Killers’ which, according to the radical daily Egin, had to be interpreted as the product of ‘an oppressed people’. In the opposite direction came a group of traditional ioaldunak dancers dressed up in sheepskins, conical hats decorated with colourful ribbons and wearing huge cowbells attached to their waists. The ioaldunak, their bells ringing as they jogged rhythmically along, were there to make the youths feel Basque. The rappers were there to make them feel hard.
A large marquee housed political meetings, where stony-faced Jarrai leaders sat in silence while the audience struggled to think up suitable questions – all asked in euskara. The same marquee was transformed at night, as bands took to the stage. The words were unintelligible, but the music was good. A mixture of thrash guitar, rock and punk, it had the raw energy that only four angry youths with electric guitars and a drum kit can produce. Trying to leave that night, however, I was reminded that this was about more than music and folklore. I, and several others, wanted to take the short route out of Zaldibia. The road was blocked by Jarrai marshals – teenagers dressed in the grunge apparel of the times but determinedly and spookily disciplined when it came to maintaining the rules. They insisted we had to go the long way around. Nobody dared break ranks. I was glad to leave. Jarrai went on to provide many ETA recruits.
With the ban on Batasuna – which was Aznar’s personal initiative – a significant shift took place in Spain’s democratic arrangements. A law was introduced which required a special tribunal of Supreme Court judges to decide whether the party was, in effect, part of ETA. The judges said it was. This was the equivalent of Britain banning Sinn Fein. It also left some 140,000 Basque voters (more than 10 per cent) without their traditional party.
Most Spaniards, however, welcomed the ban. Amongst other things, the aim of the law was to cut off Batasuna’s access to public funds. These go to officials and political groups represented in parliaments, provincial assemblies and town halls. Some of those receiving funds doubled, undoubtedly, as ETA members. Perhaps the best-known was Josu Ternera, a deputy in the Basque parliament who has since gone back into hiding. ‘Since then we have no longer had to experience the shame of seeing terrorists occupying seats in parliament,’ Aznar explains in his memoirs.
In Bera, a town on the River Bidasoa just a few miles from the French border, I went to see the ousted Batasuna mayor, Josu Goya. Goya, a friendly, bearded man in his fifties, ran a shop selling everything from umbrellas and underwear to tourist knickknacks and ironmongery. Bera was a nationalist and separatist stronghold. It was also, Goya joked, a place where ‘everyone should be considered a contrabandista, a smuggler, unless they can prove otherwise.’
Arriving early, I had driven up the steep winding road – avoiding sheep and cyclists – to the Ibardin Pass half a dozen miles out of town, where the French frontier lay. The French Pays Basque – Iparralde to Basque speakers – stretched out below me to Biarritz and Bayonne. The other side of the frontier was a place where, a Spanish Basque taxi driver in the frontier town of Irún had warned me darkly ‘people get up early, eat lunch at 12 a.m. and nobody goes out after 8 p.m. – even though they are Basques.’ It was an eloquent, if unintended, destruction of the idea of a single, culturally unified ‘Basque nation’.
Goya had been mayor for four years, after Batasuna won five out of eleven council seats in an election held during the 1998 ceasefire. Socialists and the People’s Party did not even bother presenting candidates in Bera, which lies in the euskaldun, or Basque-speaking, part of Navarre. The ceasefire had made life easier for everyone, he said. ‘The end of the ceasefire was a blow to all of us,’ he said.
The idea that Batasuna had been an ETA front was ‘a lie’, Goya insisted. Some people in it supported ETA, others did not. By stamping on the few, he suggested, they were squashing the majority. He admitted, however, that two of his fellow Batasuna councillors had been arrested for terrorism-related offences. He himself refused to be drawn into criticising ETA. ‘Who am I to judge?’ he said.
The irony of Basque political violence is that it occurs against a background of cultural renaissance almost unprecedented in Europe. Nineteenth-century linguists predicted euskara would not survive the twentieth century. ‘You are a people that are disappearing … This language that you speak, Basque people, this euzkera disappears with you; it does not matter because, like you, it must disappear; hurry to kill it off and bury it with honour, and speak in Spanish,’ Unamuno had warned in 1901. Yet, today, that language has not only been rescued but is experiencing a true literary blossoming. If Darwinian rules of selection apply to the survival of languages, Basque is not only fit but has found, in Spanish democracy, its healthiest habitat for centuries. The number of grown-up Basques who claimed they could speak or understand euskara rose from 33 per cent to 41 per cent over the decade up to 2001. Those who said they used it more or as much as Castilian rose from 14.5 per cent to 16.1 percent. Those may seem modest figures. It is certainly true that a majority of Basques do not speak the language which, according to nationalists, is a cornerstone of Basque identity. The nationalist ideal of a nation of euskaldunes – Basque speakers – still seems a dream. Turning a disappearing language around, however, is a huge task.
The secret of this has been a school system that offers children education either mainly in euskara, mainly in Castilian or jointly in both languages. Gradually Basque parents have been opting for an education in euskara – even those who do not speak it themselves. Reasons vary. Some do this out of a genuine desire for their children to learn a language that they could not. Others know that future public sector jobs in – for example – teaching, will require their children to speak it. Most Basque parents speak only castellano. Eighty per cent of state schools, however, now teach almost entirely in euskara. Castellano is given as a separate subject. Amongst those responsible for setting up this system was Fernando Buesa, a Socialist who ran the education department when Nationalists and Socialists ran the regional government in coalition. ETA paid for his services with a bomb that killed him and his bodyguard.
Teachers are given up to two years’ paid leave – and free classes every day – to learn euskara. Some of those who fail to learn have begun to find themselves without work. The result is, in some ways, artificial. Some classes are given in imperfect euskara by teachers who have learnt it relatively late in life and rarely practise it outside the school. Even those who do learn, say it can be difficult to keep the language up. ‘I don’t speak it at home, or watch it on the television or read it,’ one Basque teacher told me. ‘In some classes there are students who speak euskara at home and so speak it far better than the teacher who does not.’ Even Ibarretxe only learnt his euskara as a grown-up. Critics claim the Basque nationalists use language as a weapon. ‘The current political incorrectness of the concept of race … has caused nationalists to replace race with language,’ says one of the most vocal critics, the Basque professor Edurne Uriarte.
Novelist Bernardo Atxaga has produced what have become the first widely translated novels in euskara. ETA’s shadow falls over literature, too, however. One of the best Basque writers of Atxaga’s generation is Joseba Sarrionandia, an ETA member who was sprung from jail in 1985 by a man who would go on to lead the group – Mikel Albisu, alias Mikel Antza. Albisu hid Sarrionandia in the speakers of a musical group that visited the jail. Sarrionandia still writes, sending texts from a hideout by e-mail – and even wins literary awards. Atxaga himself has taken ETA as subject matter on several occasions. His El Hombre Solo deals with a man who leaves ETA but makes the mistake of hiding two of its members who are on the run. In Esos Cielos he tells of a woman ETA prisoner’s first days out of jail and her bus ride back to the Basque Country. Atxaga’s former ETA members are disillusioned with violence, but eternally marked by it. His heroine in Esos Cielos, on leaving jail, has no trouble in getting herself out of trouble when she picks a low-life lover who turns nasty. She fashions a sharp edge out of a melted cigarette filter and attacks him with it – violence still part of her life.
Tired of all the arguing about nationalism and history – and looking for a place where thoughts of violence would disappear, I drove to the sculpture garden of Eduardo Chillida, just outside Hernani. Chillida, a former goalkeeper for Real Sociedad, crafted hefty great sculptures out of granite and iron – two quintessentially Basque materials. They look surprisingly light and delicate here, amongst the oak trees set beside a converted caserío that serves as an indoor museum. I walk the paths and drink in the peacefulness of it all. Chillida, it seems, found harmony and contentment in his Basqueness. But then a voice comes to me from the past. It is Chillida’s rich, measured tones as they used to sound when repeated several times a day on the radio a message to ETA as it held businessman José María Aldaya for several months. ‘I am Eduardo Chillida. A request to ETA. Free Aldaya,’ it says. Even here, then, there is no escaping the shadow of violence.
In Medem’s documentary, Atxaga suggests that, should Basques solve their differences and find a place where they were all comfortable, a form of mass levitation would take place. ‘I think that, rather than walking on the ground, people will walk about twenty centimetres off it, that they will levitate. It will be only a slight levitation, in order not to provoke a scandal, but it will be the result of the weight we have taken off our shoulders.’ It is a poetic idea. It would be nice to see Basques discreetly floating off the ground.
Before they do that, however, they might have to learn some lessons from Catalonia. For most of the same gripes – about language, nationality and, above all, about history – can be heard there too. In many ways, the nationalist issue in Catalonia is more clear cut. It is also more important. There are three times as many Catalans as Basques. They account, in fact, for one in six Spaniards. No blood is spilt, however, in pursuing separatism there. There is no Catalan ETA. This may be precisely because Catalans have their feet on the ground. That characteristic, some claim, forms part of the proof that they are different from other Spaniards. But are they really so different? To find out, I decided to go back to my favourite city – and former home – Barcelona. That is always a pleasure. For if any place in the world could make me levitate, it would be the Catalan capital.