TIME EUROPE
MARCH 13, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 10
Terrorism
Violence turns green into red
By ROD USHER
A community of people who don't speak any Gaelic--or much English--looked to Northern Ireland on Good Friday last year, when peace finally appeared to have broken out there. Many in the autonomous Basque region of Spain wondered if that settlement offered them some hope for an end to their own long and bloody "Troubles."
But the Northern Ireland solution has since come unstuck, and in any case the two conflicts have as many natural differences as similarities--particularly the issue of religion. What is certain about the "Basque problem" as Spain goes to the polls next Sunday is that its end appears to be as far away as at any time over the past three decades, during which the separatist terrorist group ETA has killed nearly 800 people and maimed more.
"Peace is possible," insisted Juan María Uriarte, a bishop in the Basque city of San Sebastián last week. Uriarte has been the mediator in scant contacts between the government of Prime Minister José María Aznar and ETA's representatives. They came to nothing. Uriarte says the only way out of the tunnel is dialogue, plus "prayer, patience ... advocating forgiveness, and defending fundamental human rights, such as the right to live."
Non-violent Basques, who are the vast majority, and millions of people around the rest of the country who take to the streets to support them, hoped such sentiments might prevail when ETA called a truce in late 1998. It lasted 14 months, during which time the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), which governs the region, allied itself with Euskal Herritarrok, a party seen as the political face of the separatists. It was a gamble, angering Aznar's central government, which had an electoral pact with the PNV. But PNV president Xabier Arzalluz argues that negotiation is inevitable, that police efforts to defeat ETA are doomed to failure.
During the truce, however, many of ETA's "commandos" were caught, thanks in part to cooperation between French and Spanish security forces (ETA also seeks to "liberate" a chunk of France). Aznar's Interior Minister, Jaime Mayor Oreja, called the truce an ETA trampa, or trick, to reorganize and rearm. Certainly it sustained throughout the truce its campaign of low-level violence: in 1999, there were 390 attacks of vandalism and fire bombing in the region, nearly a third of them against the property of members of Aznar's Popular Party or of the main opposition Socialist Party.
The tone of the politicians increasingly reflects the desperate state of the region. Aznar accuses the PNV of siding with "the Europe of Kosovo, that of ethnic cleansing." Last week, PNV leader Arzalluz said Madrid is using ETA as an electoral weapon to win "blood votes." Far-left leader Julio Anguita accuses Aznar of being "insecure, weak, zigzagging and lacking in ideas."
Meanwhile, ETA is again using the only language it knows. In January, one of its car bombs killed an army colonel on his way to work in Madrid; on Feb. 22 another killed Socialist Fernando Buesa and his police bodyguard Jorge Díez near the Basque parliament. Like Northern Ireland, the northern Basque country remains beautifully green--with horrendous splashes of red.
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